SEES AND DESIST: The Utter Failure Of A Noble Scheme

All I wanted for Christmas was Noah Welch, Ryan Lannon and a newspaper column.

And I had a plan to get all three. I was going to buy Noah Welch and Ryan Lannon.

Tuesday night’s Isis Date Auction offered the captain and assistant captain of the Harvard men’s hockey team, both well over 6’, both well over 200 lbs., both with girlfriends—and I was going to purchase the blueline pair.

Ambitious? Maybe. Lacking any real purpose, other than material for a column? Yes. Guaranteed to breed awkwardness for months to come? Absolutely. Enough to deter me? Absolutely not.

I was going to use The Harvard Crimson’s money to win Noah and Ryan. On our ensuing date, I was going to hit on them openly, make them as uncomfortable as possible, and then detail the events in a subsequent column.

At this point, I enlisted my hockey co-writer Timothy J. McGinn, a move guaranteed to raise the level of Noah’s and Ryan’s collective discomfort at least threefold.

One by one, the pieces fell into place.

We secured $100 from the Harvard Crimson, claiming that “it was for a story,” and we made our way to the Kong.

“Ryan may have blond hair and blue eyes,” Tim half-joked as we climbed the stairs to the third floor, “but I think Noah’s dreamy.”

It didn’t take long for us to spot the duo.

“You’re all mine, Welch!” Tim yelled from a safe distance.

Noah blanched.

I made a ‘V’ with my fingers, pointed into my eyes, and then pointed straight into Ryan’s.

Ryan blanched.

It was on.

Shortly thereafter, Noah and Ryan took the stage. In seconds, the bidding reached our $100 maximum.

Shit.

The room went silent.

“Going once,” warned the emcee. “Going twice...”

I looked at Tim. Tim looked at me. For once, we agreed. No words were needed.

And then Tim threw his head back and let forth a battle cry from the back of the room: “110!”

The crowd of starry-eyed girls turned in unison, peering through the darkness for the deep-voiced woman who had shattered the moment.

Noah shifted uncomfortably.

Ryan nudged him and whispered, “There’s a guy bidding on us! There’s a guy bidding on us!”

From the other side of the crowd, Tim and I heard a girl call “120!”

“130!” screamed Tim.

“140!” the competition countered.

“145!”

“147!”

“148!”

“149!”

I stopped jumping up and down. Tim stopped shouting. How far over $100 should we really go?

Anxious not to send Noah and Ryan straight into the clutches of psychopathy, the emcee pounced on our hesitation and awarded the skaters to our competition for $149.

The hockey players were pleased.

“I thought, for sure, that we were going to go for, like, four dollars,” Lannon admitted.

Tim and I were not so pleased.

But it could have been worse, I suppose. Later that night, three members of the men’s water polo team went for $675, far more than Noah and Ryan raked in.

“It hurt a little.” Ryan laughed. “I don’t know what they did to go for [that much]. The two emcees who were running it were telling us to take our shirts off...but I don’t know if that would have helped or hurt our going rate.”

“I don’t know if [the water polo players] had to dance, or if they had a stalker, or what,” he added.

And so, sometime during reading period, a group of girls is going to have “a good time”—Ryan’s words—with the two defensemen.

And Tim and I are left to continue writing about the men’s hockey team, secure in the knowledge that every interaction with the players, from here on out, will be unbelievably uncomfortable.

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.