Images of Celebration Hide Frustration

The first, and lasting, images are of victory.

Ed Krayer backhanding in The Goal. Bill Cleary dancing in celebration on the St. Paul Civic Center ice. Ed Presz lofting the Beanpot into the air.

Dave Berkoff, gold medal around his neck, smiling on a television broadcast from Seoul. Travis Metz wet and shivering on the banks of Lake Quinsigamond after an Eastern Sprints win.

It is easy to be blinded by the glare of the gold medal. To remember St. Paul, Minn., and forget Cambridge, Mass.

It is easy to forget the other images, the more common images, of this year in Harvard sports. Those are images of frustration and disappointment. Images of teams that started the season with so much promise and finished with so many unanswered questions.

Two basketball players holding a tearful vigil at Briggs Cage following the final loss in their final season. The devastation on the football players' faces as they walked out of The Stadium following a lost Game and a lost season. Two senior soccer players, heads down and spikes flung over the shoulders, leaving Ohiri Field without an NCAA bid for the first time in three years.

Expectations were high for this year's crop of Crimson athletes. In 1987-88, Harvard had captured a record 12 Ivy titles for the third time in the decade. This year's teams were expected to bring home even more.

It didn't happen.

The Crimson may have finished with its first NCAA title in 85 years, but it only won five Ivy titles and a trio of Eastern crew crowns.

The teams that won come as no surprise--both hockey programs repeated as league champions, as did women's swimming, squash, and women's lacrosse. And crew victories--the men's and women's heavyweights and the men's lightweights all won at Eastern Sprints--are certainly not unusual or unexpected. No, the surprises came from those teams which didn't win--the teams which had skill, but could not find success.

It wasn't for lack of trying. The heartbreak and frustration was evident on many faces. There just weren't any answers.

Ivy ring on his finger, senior Greg Ubert couldn't explain what happened to the football team last fall. The magical 1987 Ivy championship season was followed by a miserable bottom-of-the-pack outing.

In mid-October, Harvard watched as it took only two sloppy snaps to give Cornell a 19-17 victory at The Stadium. By mid-November, the Big Red was 8-2 and Ivy champs. Harvard was 2-8 and sharing sixth place with Columbia.

Six months later, there were no answers for the problems that plagued the Harvard baseball team, leaving Ubert with his second sub-.500 season in a year that began with hopes for not one, but two league titles.

Ubert was far from the only senior athlete with shattered dreams. Sarah Duncan is the proud owner of two Ivy championship rings. For Duncan, a forward on the women's basketball team, playing Dartmouth for the Ivy title in the final game of the season is almost a ritual.

This season, the big game rolled around with no title up for grabs and no hope left for the Crimson.

The men's soccer team suffered the biggest fall. The team was picked number one in the nation in the pre-season polls and had nearly all its players back from last year's Final Four team.

By the third week of the season, Coach Mike Getman's face had taken on a look of disbelief. The team stumbled against UConn, then fell to Hartwick and Dartmouth as the season seemed to snowball. No Ivy title, no national ranking, no invitation back to the NCAA tourney.

The men's lacrosse team didn't last much longer in the national polls. Rated seventh in the nation on April 12, the team went on the skids, losing six straight games.

But the men's lacrosse field did not tell the story of the Spring of '89. Next door, the women's lacrosse team rolled through a perfect regular season, capturing the Ivy title and wreaking revenge on Temple--the team that had ended the Crimson's NCAA hopes the season before.

Harvard took a 13-0 record to West Chester, Pa., and the NCAA Final Four. The Crimson topped Princeton in the semifinals, but Penn State held steady for a 7-6 triumph in the championship. Still, the loss did not mar the Crimson's season. That day in West Chester, the team acted like it was a champion--as if nothing had changed since April, when it trounced Dartmouth to clinch the Ivy title.

The first--and lasting--image that confronted a spectator at Ohiri Field that Ivy-title-winning day in April was one of smiling faces.

But on the neighboring field, the men's lacrosse team practiced drill after drill, the shadow of its losing season blending into the twilight.