As Time Goes By

For 83 years, the Harvard men's basketball team has been forced to face the reality. Sooner or later, of face the reality, sooner or later, of not winning the Ivy League championship.

Last year, reality did not present itself until a loss to Cornell on the final weekend of the season.

This year, with four games remaining, it already has.

The weekend's back-to-back losses to Penn and Princeton assure that the cagers will conclude this year as they have all 83 before.

Barring an unforseen and unlikely catastrophe. Penn will cop this year's crown, its 10th in the last 17 years. Its only loss will have been to Harvard, but that means very little-last year's champions, the Tigers, lost to the Crimson twice.

There's no telling where Harvard will wind up, because there's no telling when the Crimson, which has yet to defeat any team in the league twice, will start winning again.

"I feel bad," Harvard Coach Frank McLaughlin said after Saturday's 52-45 Princeton victory. "I feel bad for the team because these guys have done so much...

They certainly have in the tenure of Co-Captains Joe Carrabino and Bob Jerry, the Harvard basketball program that was very recently the laughingstock of the Ivies has been a legitimate title contender two year in a row.

They have gone from the dim obscurity of the Indoor Athletic Building to Briggs Athletic Center. There over the weekend they drew 4000 in two nights, a record for the three year-old facility.

They have even turned basketball into a respectable spectator sport at Harvard, a notorious hockey stronghold. The cheers in Briggs over the weekend were straight out of Bright, down to shouts of "sieve sieve"-directed now at the Harvard basket.

They have set a national record for free-throw shooting and fielded a player who was Harvard's first Ivy League Player of the Year, who will finish his career a the school's all time leading scorer.

They have even beaten Princeton and Penn on the road for the first time ever.

Without Meaning

But none of that matters, cause the Tigers and the Quakers returned the favor, and everything else pales in comparison.

Its importance disappeared in the flurry of Friday's two point, last second loss and the bench clearing brawl with 21 second, to go in Saturday's.

All that will go in the record book is that Harvard failed to win a basketball title again, despite being favored for the first time in its history.

And all that reinains is the goal of a respectable finish, the goal of so many other Harvard hoop teams in the final weeks of the season.