All But Strikes

PROVIDENCE, R.I.--It's March, so it must be time for baseball. But more on that in moment.

There is a small matter of the Harvard men's basketball season, which, as you read now, consists of one more game.

The second-to-last game took place yesterday in Brown's Williams Center, and it, well, hurt.

Harvard coulda, shoulda and woulda won this game with only a few different plays down the stretch.

Despite starting the game with its smoothest offensive flow of the season--hitting a season-high eight three-pointers and holding the Bears to two free throws in the game's last 6:04--the Crimson fell short in another disappointingly-close League loss.

Granted, it wasn't exactly a game to get the adrenaline flowing.

Playing in sleepy gym more reminiscent of a bad high-school barn than a Division-I college arena, the Crimson was confronted by nearlyempty stands and a lonely heckler at courtside who seemed to know all their names.

Throw in a cheesy paper airplane-throwing contest at halftime, and you see why Brown isn't exactly the cradle of college basketball.

For whatever reason, however, Harvard's players ignored the potential distractions and put out a terrific effort.

There was Darren Rankin hitting spinning lay-ups, Jared Leake diving for loose balls out a career-high seven assists.

In the second half, though, the Crimson couldn't keep up when it counted.

This Brown team, with 12 wins, has won more games than any other Bears basketball squad since 1986, and it showed why yesterday.

With Brown's Brian Lloyd, a trashtalking street shooter, bombing in long-distance treys consistently, Harvard simply had no answer.

A blase halftime score--it read 32-30, Harvard--gave way to some desperate last-minute fouling and an aggressive attempt at full-court pressure.

"They had a couple of fast breaks, and we weren't executing [down the stretch]," Rankin said. "Our shots weren't falling, and they just opened it up a little bit more than we did."

Effort, effort and more effort. It was there. But the execution wasn't. The bottom line: loss.

What can you say? At this point, with tonight's contest at Yale the last stop on this three-and-a-half month season-trek, the players and coaches will just try to forget about this game and more on.

Which brings us to baseball. The Harvard-Brown game last night, in a strange way, brought to mind the words of the Oakland A's pitcher, who, when asked what he threw to get then-Toronto Blue Jay Danny Ainge out, replied: "Strikes."

Maybe throwing the ball down the middle of the plate isn't that easy. Sports, after all, are a lot easier to critique than to play.

But if Harvard had thrown strikes yesterday, simply strikes, this column would have been about a win, and not the loss that it was.

Peter K. Han is Crimson staff writer. He finished in second-place in the game's half-time paper airplane throwing contest.