Women's Basketball drops Yale and then loses against Brown on a last-second prayer

After 39 minutes and 56 seconds of containment and uncharacteristically poor shooting, Brown guard Sarah Hayes finally found the hole she had sought all night.

And once the hole opened, there was no closing it. The athletic Hayes, fleet of foot and with the highest vertical on the court, juked Harvard guard Laura Robinson on an inbounds play and sprinted upcourt just as her teammate threw a perfect baseball pass down the left sideline. A few dribbles later, Hayes put that vertical leap to good use, jumping over three frantic, out-of-place Harvard defenders and burying a 20-footer with 0.4 seconds remaining.

“Yeah, that’s Sarah Hayes,” said Harvard head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith. “I thought that was too easy a shot for her. We should have contained, we should have made her shoot over us, and [the shot] should have been from further out.”

The jumper gave the Bears (9-8, 3-1 Ivy) a 64-62 victory and rendered obsolete the fierce comeback that Harvard (5-11, 1-2 Ivy) had made in the final five minutes. On the scripted inbounds play, Hayes was the only Brown player who ever crossed halfcourt.

“That’s a mistake there,” Delaney-Smith said. “That turned into a foot race we shouldn’t have been in.”

Hayes’ dagger silenced a Harvard bench that had erupted after Robinson sank two free throws to tie the game at 62 with just under four seconds remaining.

“It was pretty brutal,” co-captain Maureen McCaffery said. “We weren’t really expecting it. I think we played well at the end. It was really exciting, but they got lucky.”

Robinson had frustrated Hayes into off-balance shots almost all night, holding arguably the league’s most explosive player to four first-half points. But Hayes, an acrobatic offensive rebounder with an uncanny finishing ability for a guard, posted 12 second-half points—including seven points, two offensive rebounds, and a steal in the frantic final five minutes.

After a sluggish first half, the Crimson claimed its first lead of the night on junior forward Christiana Lackner’s free throw with 5:01 remaining. The game went back and forth for the next several possessions before a tough three-point play from Hayes gave the Bears a 58-54 cushion with 3:02 left.

Then Robinson, much like in Friday’s win over Yale, took over on the offensive end for Harvard. The Crimson—playing without co-captain Jess Holsey, who was out for the weekend with an eye injury—needed some offensive firepower, and they got it once again from Robinson. She sank two free throws to bring the game to within two at 58-56 and finished the night with 13 points.

“Laura did a great job under pressure tonight,” Delaney-Smith said. “They tried to ice her and she didn’t get iced.”

But after Brown’s Colleen Kelly nailed a jumper with 19 seconds left to give Brown another four-point lead, Crimson rookie forward Katie Rollins corralled an offensive rebound on the ensuing possession and drew contact after making the layup.

When Rollins, who led Harvard with 17 points, could not convert the free throw, Robinson sprinted to retrieve a tough, off-balance offensive rebound and was fouled by Hayes while tumbling out of bounds.

Two more free throws later, the Crimson, which had trailed by as much as 13 in the second half, looked primed to take the contest into overtime.

“[Robinson’s] incredible,” McCaffery said. She’s who we want on the line in that situation. She was great tonight.”

Robinson’s heroics, however, were short-lived after Hayes swished the shot that silenced Lavietes Pavilion. Though the Crimson called a desperation timeout with 0.4 ticks remaining, a baseball pass was deflected away by Hayes—who else—as time expired.

The Crimson returns to action this weekend, when Harvard hosts Columbia on Friday and Cornell on Saturday.

—Staff writer Aidan E. Tait can be reached at atait@fas.harvard.edu.