Ivy Champs Prep for Rematch, NCAA Bid

The banner hasn’t been stitched, the net hasn’t been cased, and the trophy hasn’t arrived—yet.

Three days have passed since the Harvard women’s basketball team pulled off an incomprehensible 15-point comeback to upset arch-rival Dartmouth in the Ivy League championship game and take a share of the league title.

So what now?

“We get to do it all over again,” senior guard Katie Murphy said.

Murphy, who put Tuesday’s game on ice by fleecing Sydney Scott under the Dartmouth basket with 43 seconds remaining, isn’t being facetious. With tomorrow evening’s playoff rematch between the Crimson (20-7, 12-2 Ivy) and the Big Green (16-10, 12-2), the stakes are different but undeniably real.

“Now,” said Harvard coach Kathy Delaney-Smith on Tuesday night, “it’s about who’s going to the NCAA.”

This time, winner keeps playing—at one of eight possible sites for the first round of the 2005 NCAA Tournament, to be televised on ESPN—and loser goes home. For good.

This time, Harvard won’t have nearly 2,000 fans showing up on its doorstep. The playoff will take place in a neutral location: the Pizzitola Center in Providence, R.I.

And this time, the Crimson faces a mean Big Green squad that wants its dignity back.

“They are still trying to hold onto their championship,” Murphy said. “We still don’t really have anything to lose.”

In defiance of the spirit of March basketball, Delaney-Smith said all bets are off.

“If you bet money on it, you’re gonna lose,” she said. “If you don’t know by now, it’s gonna be a dog fight down there.”

Fans have come to expect as much from the rivalry. Now entering its 20th year—that’s how long Delaney-Smith and Dartmouth head coach Chris Wielgus, the Ivies’ deans of women’s hoops, have been skirmishing—it has provided a steady diet of topsy-turvy contests and stirring performances.

This is the third time the two squads have met this season. On Jan. 8, Harvard managed an equally exuberant comeback—from 19 down with 13:34 remaining—only to lose in overtime by three.

“We knew the first time out what we should’ve done,” said Crimson captain Reka Cserny, who poured 12 points on the Big Green in the last 6:02 of Tuesday’s showdown. “Now we believe that we can beat them.”

Like the Harvard team, Cserny will enter tomorrow’s game with a little more clout than usual. That’s because she is the 2005 Ivy League Player of the Year, as voted by the coaches and announced yesterday.

Averaging 21.2 points per game, good for sixth in the nation, she also received First Team All-Ivy honors for the fourth straight season—joining Allison Feaster ’98 and Hana Peljto ’04 as the only Crimson players to have done so.

Harvard junior point guard Jessica Holsey, who led the Ivy League in assists in 2004-05 at 4.8 per game, was selected to the Ivies’ Second Team.

Sharing honors with the two Crimson stars are four Dartmouth players—center Elise Morrison, a first-teamer, guard Angie Soriaga and forward Ashley Taylor, both second-teamers, and honorable mention guard Jeannie Cullen, who pumped two near-impossible threes in the waning minutes of Tuesday’s game.

“Cullen is just an unstoppable shooter,” Murphy said.

Taylor and Morrison combined on 10 turnovers on Tuesday after being hassled by Crimson defenders on the perimeter and in the paint. A superb Harvard defensive effort registered 11 steals and countless deflections out of bounds.

“I think they’ll tell their guards to cut out harder and make tighter passes,” Murphy said. “We were talking about watching film, but we know their personnel. We know their game.”

Thus are the advantages of playing a team back-to-back. But there’s no getting around the fact that the Crimson must manage twice as many Ivy defeats in one week—two—as Dartmouth suffered all year.

There’s a silver lining, of course. And its name is Providence’s Pizzitola Sports Center, where the Big Green fell to hometown Brown on February 25.

“We love the Brown gym,” Cserny said, “because we have won there and they haven’t.”

“We’re undefeated,” Murphy added.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.