Forget the Florida trip. Forget the Big 5. Forget Loyola. Forget North Carolina.
The real season starts today.
And it's a late start, to be sure. Harvard's trip to the Palestra tonight will mark the first time that the Quakers (5-12, 0-0) have ever opened their Ivy League season in February.
But as senior captain Brian Grandieri knows, a fresh start is worth the wait.
"This is the best part of the season for me, and it always has been," he said.
Penn coach Glen Miller is just as eager to put the team's rocky non-conference stretch behind him.
"It's really two separate seasons," he said.
"We all know that the road to the NCAA tournament has everything to do with conference play, but we're going to have to play much better basketball to be a team that can compete in the upper-tier of the conference."
Enter the Crimson (6-12, 1-1 Ivy), who have been every bit as inconsistent this season as Penn. In his first season at the helm, Tommy Amaker has led Harvard to an upset win over Michigan, the school that forced him out last season after six years as head coach there.
At the same time, his squad has yet to win a game this season on the road. What's more, the Crimson haven't won at the Palestra in their last 15 tries.
Returning from a 20-day layoff due to final exams, however, Harvard will be starting fresh as well. In their last outing, the Crimson couldn't complete a season sweep of Dartmouth, losing the second match of the home-and-home series.
But Harvard displayed a strong, balanced attack in its win over the Big Green a week earlier, featuring strong guard-play from Andrew Pusar, the Crimson's biggest perimeter threat.
Add Jeremy Lin on the outside, who has greatly improved his range and accuracy, and Harvard's backcourt combination is a formidable one.
It may be up to oft-injured Penn freshman guard Harrison Gaines to slow the duo down. He's missed time due to a hamstring injury but expects to be "100 percent" on Friday.
Even if the Quakers neutralize the guards, they still have a frontcourt with which to contend.
Forward Pat Magnarelli has also given Harvard a presence in the frontcourt. Coming off of a back injury from last season, Magnarelli - whom Miller recruited heavily when he coached at Brown - has posted four double-doubles to this point, recently netting 21 points and pulling down 11 rebounds against Colgate.
To that end, the Quakers will be focused on denying Magnarelli and his frontcourt-mates the ball.
"We've really focused on defense [in practice]," Grandieri said. "They do like to put the ball in the post, so we've been working on how we're going to defend the post."
On the Quakers' end, Miller emphasized that "the keyword is 'consistency.'"
"Through our struggles we've still shown that we can play some good basketball," he said. "We just have not been able to put full games together, and that has to change."
And with the Ivy League season finally here, that change needs to happen fast. Penn has no more room for error.
