BOSTON -- Hell of a ballgame here Saturday night.
A packed arena, a back-and-forth overtime game, an upset victory, the Penn-Harvard game had everything a hoops fan could ask for -- a Harvard hoops fan anyway.
"It was a tremendous, great basketball game," Penn coach Fran Dunphy said of Harvard's 78-75 overtime win. "I wish we could've won, but my hat is off to the Harvard group."
It was the kind of game you don't even realize is a classic because you're too busy enjoying it, too wrapped up in the game's tempo and violent swings in momentum to take stock of what's happening. Then, at some point late in the second half, you look up at the evenly-divided crowd and the scoring deadlock and realize that you're damn lucky to be there.
Consider -- the game was so hotly contested that even the two cheerleading squads got into an impromptu bout of one-upsmanship between the end of regulation and the beginning of overtime.
In the waning seconds of that break, a Penn cheerleader ran out to center court and did a series of flips back to her sideline, to a loud chorus of cheering Quakers fans. Not to be outdone, a Harvard cheerleader ran out to center court, and flipped all the way back to her sideline, to the tune of hundreds of screaming Crimson faithful. Then, a member of the Harvard dance team did a series of flips halfway across the court before running back to her sideline with her finger in the air.
So, with the score 2-1 in Harvard's favor, one of Penn's male cheerleaders did his own set of flips from center court all the way home just as the buzzer sounded to call the two teams back.
Odd about this was how into the whole thing the crowds actually seemed. How often do you see a crowd respond to the whole cheerleading shtick with anything but a smattering of indifference?
This was different, though. No one left, and the crowd just let itself get swept away by the ebb and flow of a beautiful game.
What the crowd witnessed was a textbook upset, if there is such a thing.
It took game-long foul trouble for Quakers point guard Andy Toole, a severe dropoff in Penn's outside shooting from the previous night, an extra five minutes and a stunning performance by Crimson guard Patrick Harvey for Harvard to knock off the favored Quakers.
"I thought Patrick Harvey was tremendous, just tremendous," Dunphy said. "A great effort, we couldn't guard him. He did a great job."
Indeed, Harvey scored 28 points on 9-for-15 shooting. He shot 4-for-5 from beyond the arc. And the other five buckets, well, you usually don't see those plays made by a guy in a Harvard uniform.
If Harvey wasn't draining buckets from outside, he was driving the lane hitting running floater after improbable running floater. At one point, Harvey was elevated about six feet from the basket and at a 45-degree angle to the floor -- a low-percentage shot to be sure -- but Harvey flicked the wrist on his outstretched right arm, and the ball fell through the net.
"Penn's the best team in the league every year," Harvey said. They "just like to play basketball, they don't have the real methodical offense [like Princeton]. Definitely Penn is a much funner team to play against."
While everything fell into place for this Crimson upset, one has to assume that Harvey won't be able to duplicate his performance in a hostile Palestra. And if, for some reason, a grammar contest breaks out, look for the Quakers in a rout.
