A Win for Us All

We write to congratulate the Harvard men’s basketball team for its first-ever NCAA conference win. Harvard rarely gets the chance to be the plucky underdog, but we certainly found ourselves in that role with our 14-seed team facing off against three-seed New Mexico. Furthermore, our team had come back from the graduation of two key players, the withdrawal of two more in the wake of the Government 1310 cheating scandal, and the mission trip departure of a fifth. But the team overcame these challenges and blew past expectations. We applaud their effort and cheer their victory.

We write not only to congratulate the team, but also to thank them. The team’s victory over New Mexico incited a great outpour of support and enthusiasm, even from a campus whose residents had departed on spring break adventures. Facebook and Twitter filled up with enthusiasm, uniting a far-flung student body around a single, distant game. Nor was the response limited to the virtual. Bars in New York City were filled with Harvard students who took to the streets when we won. Establishments in Harvard Square were utterly packed. Houses such as Currier held big-screen viewings of the games; these, too, were filled to capacity. It was a sight to see.

Harvard has many strengths, undergraduate spirit and cohesion is not among them. Sometimes, we are skeptical that a strong Harvard student community exists. This page has done its part to express that skepticism, from repeated exhortations for students to reach out to their peers, to the oft-heard criticism that the campus lacks social space. The basketball team’s victory was a welcome opportunity to see just how strong our community is. Even for an away game over spring break, Harvard students were drawn together, wherever they were. Athletics has a particular ability to transcend so many of the little boundaries that balkanize our campus culture. Regardless of whether we ourselves are athletes or academics, musicians or artists, activists or public servants, or all of these and more (for Harvard is a very busy place, sometimes), we were, for that game, united.

Like all such moments, of course, our NCAA run had to end. But despite Harvard’s defeat by Arizona, the school spirit our basketball team showed us lives on. We thank them for that, and look forward to next year, when we’re expecting even more amazing things from the team. We’re very fortunate to be on campus for Harvard’s first NCAA Tournament win, and we hope that basketball’s continued excellence will give us many more opportunities to celebrate their victories as a unified community in the years to come.