Love It or Leeve It: Saving the Year's Best For Last

[flashing numbers, beeping noises]

Right now, professors have taken over Harvard, plotting a continuing assault of papers, projects and problem sets. The NBA and NHL playoffs are heating up. Baseball and spring have finally decided to coincide. My name is Brenda Lee, and today is the longest day of my life…

Okay, so I’m not special agent Jack Bauer from 24. That’s clear from my inability to come back from the dead after being hit with a tazer, cut numerous times with a scalpel and flat-lining in the hands of terrorists.

Oh, and I’m also not a white man.

But like superhero-slash-superstud Jack, I do feel a time crunch these days, just when the wide world of sports is most tempting. No matter what apathy I feel towards the NBA and the NHL during their regular seasons, I wish I had more time to sit and veg in front of games that actually mean something. The sun is doing its best to make up for letting it snow in April, so it’s impossible to stay inside and work. Plus my Astros are finally playing someone other than the Expos, with a three-game series against the always-easy-to-loathe Braves.

And yet, instead of smooth sailing into reading period, I find myself stressed, laden with work and impatient for the summer. At least in high school, I could still watch my men play ball every night during finals and APs without a shred of guilt.

Such a thought makes me wonder not just where all the time went but also how we let Harvard and all its academic fanfare take over. We’re too young to have to skip a sunny day in our courtyards for the sake of work. We’ve got plenty of years ahead to pull 9-to-5 days Monday through Friday regardless of the weather in the real world while we have just four years in college.

I think worrying about cracking into Group I should cause far less anxiety than watching another ninth inning collapse by the Red Sox bullpen. In all seriousness, I’d say it’s a toss-up for what matters more in the grand scheme of things—grades or sports teams. Sox fans subject themselves yearly to heartache, while students subject themselves to, well, subjects.

I think everyone should have the time to watch Harvard spring sports in all their glory instead of hitting up Lamont. As one of maybe 12 people in the stands at the Crimson’s JV baseball game on Sunday, I remembered again the simple pleasure of watching my friends play sports, even though the fans at O’Donnell Field have nothing on devotees of Texas high school football. If JV’s not your style, chew on this—both the men’s and women’s tennis teams won Ivy Championships, and they find out their seedings today for the NCAA tourney. That’s more exciting than the reading for “Dialects of Globalizing Matters in the Universe.”

Too bad that the professors don’t exactly agree with my whole relaxation theory.

But still, we’re all able to enjoy these precious moments of college while still being responsible students. If you want proof of how much we’re going to miss these years, just look at Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy, who was photographed kissing female students with a beer in his hand at a frat party at the ripe old age of 47. Eustachy’s behavior was disturbing, pathetic and outright wrong—let’s not have any Harvard kids revealing the repressed party animal inside 25 years from now.

So whether it’s as simple as a stroll across the river to take in a few innings of baseball’s doubleheader with Dartmouth this weekend or a few hours of ESPN before hitting the books, we have to make sure to live the end of the school year. We’re lucky to have more than 24 hours at our disposal. Let’s use them wisely.

—Staff writer Brenda E. Lee can be reached at belee@fas.harvard.edu.