M. Hoops Ends Up and Down Season

By the way everybody was lingering around Lee Amphitheater after Saturday night's 81-58 blowout of Yale, you could tell it was a season finale.

Tim Hill was chatting with his parents and accepting congratulations from the Bulldog backcourt, Paul Fisher was cracking jokes and Bill Ewing was struggling to fit his 6'9 frame into a series of photographs.

At the end of four very full years, you got the sense that nobody on the Harvard men's basketball team wanted things to end just yet.

And with good reason--for all that the Crimson achieved, it seemed like everybody wanted something more than a .500 record to show for it.

"It was a good weekend," said senior shooting guard Mike Beam. "Given everything that happened with the win over Princeton, it would have been easy to let our guard down."

The laundry list of Harvard's accomplishments is long:

Over the past four seasons, the Crimson (13-13, 7-7 Ivy) has tallied a school-record 58 wins and finished at .500 or better four times, the longest such streak since 1928.

Hill broke Tarik Campbell '94's career assists mark, finishing with 590, and wound up second all-time in Ivy League history. Beam made 68 three-pointers, just five shy of the Harvard single-season mark.

And the Crimson supplied several dazzling moments, stunning Boston College 62-61 in the season opener on Beam's buzzer-beater and famously outlasting Princeton in overtime 87-79 on Senior Night at Lavietes Pavilion.

The Crimson played its last eight games without the services of captain Paul Fisher, who went down with mononucleosis while averaging 10.7 points and 7.3 rebounds per game. Only the intervention of senior Bill Ewing--who rounded out the season playing the best basketball of his career, including three double-doubles over a span of six games--salvaged the frontcourt.

But Harvard also featured some serious head-scratchers, like a Nov. 28 home loss to Lehigh (which finished 6-22) and a Dec. 11 road loss to Colgate, a middle-of-the-road Patriot League team.

"I definitely can't explain that," Beam said. "Overall, you have to say it was a mediocre season, since we either played great or we played awful. We won games we weren't supposed to and we lost games we weren't supposed to."

That on-again, off-again quality would be the hallmark of this team. Take two of the season's first three games: sophomore forward Dan Clemente wasn't expected to play all season, let alone against the Eagles, the Crimson went down 10 at halftime in front of a rambunctious road crowd, yet managed to grit out a one-point win at the horn. Clemente played four minutes late in the second half and scored six points on a pair of crucial three-pointers.

Ten days later, Harvard would surrender a season-high 89 points in a loss to Lehigh, letting the Mountain Hawks' Brett Eppehimer have his way to the tune of 30 points.

"This year has had three of the biggest wins of my Harvard career: B.C., Santa Clara and Princeton," Hill said. "But it seems like we were just on or off. We lost to Colgate and Lehigh, teams we're never supposed to lose to."

The Crimson kept its head above water during its non-conference schedule, but got its rude awakening Dec. 16 when it hosted Dartmouth in the traditional Ivy League opener. Historically, the Big Green has provided a good barometer of how the Crimson will finish, but this time Harvard got blown out of Lavietes.

"Dartmouth's a team that thrives on momentum," Hill said. "And that night they just came out firing and shot the lights out."

The Big Green waltzed out of Cambridge with a 78-59 win, then took the back end of the home-and-home series a month later in Hanover, 69-67. Those two losses, coupled with a 72-62 loss at Columbia, left the Crimson 1-3 in the Ivy League and virtually out of contention before the exam break even started.

Harvard played the rest of the way for pride, as they say, and played three of its best games of the season at Princeton and in the Penn-Princeton homestand.

And as usual, the Crimson littered the Ivy leader boards, with Hill ranking sixth in scoring (16.0 ppg) and first in assists (6.6); Clemente eighth in three-point shooting (41.7 percent) and 10th in scoring (14.7 ppg); Beam fourth in three-point shooting (43.3 percent) and Ewing third in blocks (47).

Notes

Monday the Crimson held its formal end-of-season meeting, casting ballots for team awards and electing next year's captain. The latter should be a formality, as junior swingman Damian Long is the only rising senior on the varsity roster. The results will be disclosed during the team banquet in May.

Sophomore transfer Ethan Altaratz's alma mater, Samford University, qualified for its first-ever NCAA Tournament last week, securing the Trans-America Athletic Conference's automatic bid.