Grabbing the Win

OK, readers, let's play a game. Close your eyes (but keep on reading), and picture this in your mind:

It's the second half of the Harvard men's basketball game against Cornell. There's a little bit more than six minutes left, and the Crimson is up by nine. What do you think?

1) "Gee, it would seem rather likely that Harvard will win, given that it has a commanding lead."

2) "Uh-oh. Harvard's winning. They're in for it now."

If you answered one, then you haven't been to very many basketball games this season.

In past games, the Crimson has shown an uncanny knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The team was 4-20 coming into last night's game--2-10 in the Ivy League--and in many of those contests Harvard held some large leads.

Like a 30-18 advantage over Yale. Or leads over Princeton in regulation and overtime, only to lose in the second overtime. Or a 53-46 lead over Brown. For some strange reason, the Crimson was unable to put games away.

Until last night. The game against Cornell seemed to be thoroughly different than Harvard's other engagements. The Crimson played with intensity unseen previously this season. One moment, senior guard James White (four points) knocks the ball away from a Cornell player and lands with a thud on the ground. The next, junior forward Mike Gilmore (10 points) slams one of his two dunks home, causing the home bench to jump for joy.

"The difference was determination," Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. "We came out with an attitude that if we were going to start winning it was going to start now."

What's more, the Crimson played the fundamentals much better than it has in the past. Two stats leap off of the box score--steals and turnovers. Harvard had 12 steals and three give-aways; Cornell earned zero and 22.

That's just amazing. Minimizing turnovers is one thing, but putting the ball a Swiss bank account is another.

And, looking at the game stats a bit closer, you see that Cornell committed 40 fouls to Harvard's 19. Usually, that statistic is the other way around.

But even with all this going right for the home team, the score at half-time was tied at 33. The key was that Cornell sharpshooters such as Brandt Schuckman and Troy Torbert helped the Big Red make 47.8 percent of its shots in the first stanza, whereas the Crimson only converted on 35.5 percent. To boot, Harvard only made two of 11 three-point shots, as opposed to 4-9 for the visitors.

"We gave them [three-point looks] that we wanted them not to have," Harvard coach Frank Sullivan said. "But we had a better game taking care of the ball tonight."

In the second half, however, the differences in both emotion and ball-handling remained, which allowed Harvard to slowly build a lead.

Then came the moment of truth. Harvard was up by nine, and up rose the eternal question. Feast or famine? Choke or swallow?

"[The threat of losing] is always in the back of my mind," Gilmore said. "But I think that we were really playing to win."

The answer turned out to be crystal-clear. How does a 14-7 Crimson run sound to you?

Well, it doesn't sound like another Harvard loss. Instead, it's revenge--not only for the Crimson's 71-61 loss earlier to the Big Red, but for all of Harvard's close defeats this season.

If you want to win, you gotta go out and grab it.