¡Qué Emocionante! Homesick for Harvard Hoops

My, how things change when you switch continents for a semester.

I’m not talking about the language barriers, time zone differences, or weather changes I encountered upon arriving in Buenos Aires, Argentina, two weeks ago.

I’m referencing the meteoric rise of the Harvard women’s basketball team, a squad that limped to a 2-11 start in the non-conference slate before torching the Ivy League with a 13-1 conference mark.

When I left Cambridge, the Crimson was just beginning conference play in late January. A shocking road loss at Yale – a game marred by Harvard’s 20 percent clip from behind the arc and a 35.1 percent mark from the field – on the opening weekend of Ivy play seemed an early harbinger of inconsistency and underperforming.

Then I flew south for the spring, and the Crimson took off running. 12 straight wins in Ivy League play – 10 of them by 10 points or more – helped the Crimson to its first NCAA tournament berth since 2003. Harvard’s 13 wins is the league’s most since the Crimson ran the table in 2002-2003 before losing 79-69 to Kansas State in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.

And all the while, I’ve been in Argentina, watching endless hours of soccer (no complaints about that) and snatching only precious few basketball highlights on ESPN Deportes (all of them are of Manu Ginobili).

I trekked through a horrendous blizzard in March 2005 to watch Harvard and Reka Cserny ’05 rally to beat Dartmouth and claim a share of the Ivy Title. One week later, we drove through sleet and rain to see the Crimson fall to the same Big Green team in a playoff in Providence. Last year, I covered a team plagued by youth, inexperience and injuries—a squad that fell out of the Ivy title picture before the second round of Ivies even started.

Now, as the Crimson goes dancing for the first time in four years, I can’t help but feel a little left out.

Despite winning gold in men’s basketball for the first time in the 2004 Olympics, Argentina remains a stolidly fútbol-crazy nation. The term ‘March Madness’ would likely fall on deaf ears, as each local match between rival clubs carries with it the intensity (and, often, the violence) of a bruising Duke-UNC showdown.

Madness, during Argentina’s soccer season, is hardly confined to one month.Sure, Ginobili’s face litters the front page of the sports section even on San Antonio’s off-days. Even Andres Nocioni and the Baby Bulls make a few headlines.

But college basketball? It’s about as popular as a British national team jersey at a local soccer game. If you see it on TV, something must be wrong – or something will be very soon.

So when Harvard hits the court for its first-round NCAA matchup next weekend, the local sports channel will likely be showing highlights from the previous day’s soccer games. I’ll be forced to refresh ESPN Game Tracker every 30 seconds, all the while sending e-mails to the other beat writers for updates.

It’s a rare thing that a major Crimson sports team marches all the way to the NCAA Tournament. It’s rarer still that any team, independent of conference affiliation, starts a season so poorly and rattles off 12 wins in a row to rout the rest of the league.

The Ivies’ second-place finisher. Dartmouth, was just 9-5 in conference play. Quite frankly, nobody else ever had a shot.

This Harvard team that has so excelled in my absence carries with it the perimeter punch and the low-post presence to not only dominate the Ivy League, but to make a game out of a first-round matchup in the NCAA tournament.

The 2-11 non-conference mark will hurt Harvard’s seeding. The Crimson, however, has ripped off 12 straight wins by an average margin of 17.3 points a game. Harvard’s guard trio of Emily Tay, Lindsay Hallion, and Niki Finelli is athletic enough to create offense and defend against a Top 25 team.

But rebounding and defense take center stage in NCAA tournament games.And the Crimson’s low-post game, anchored by sophomore standout Katie Rollins and captain Christiana Lackner, morphed into a rebounding machine in the second half of the season. Harvard outrebounded its opponent in each of its 14 Ivy League contests—a stat that, perhaps more than any other, exemplifies the Crimson’s turn around from one year ago.

Crimson head coach Kathy Delaney-Smith harped about rebounding for much of the two previous seasons, and it seems this Harvard team finally took it to heart.

Either that, or me being out of the country has been the Crimson’s good luck charm throughout the conference schedule.

There is, after all, little evidence to the contrary.

If Harvard goes on to a first-round upset in the NCAA Tournament – its first since the 1998 shocker over No.1-seeded Stanford – Delaney-Smith might see to it that I’m never allowed back into the country.

What with the eternal summer down here, I can’t say I’d mind too much.

But I wouldn’t mind a thank-you note, postmarked from Cleveland, Ohio.

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