Kevin Egee's YouTube moment disappears

The Penn basketball team's 51-50 win at Columbia on March 7 was a great memory in a season mostly full of bad ones. The Quakers spent most of the night playing catchup and were down a pair with 1.9 ticks left, but senior captain Kevin Egee drilled an impossible three-pointer off a flawless inbounds play to snatch the game away. It wasn't being televised, but someone in the crowd that night had a camera rolling and later posted a grainy clip of the final play on YouTube, where Egee's moment could live on forever.

Or perhaps not. The video has since been removed at the request of Columbia's Athletics Department. See for yourself: The original link, which had been posted on The Buzz, now just gives a message reading "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Columbia University Athletics." So far as I can tell, there are no other versions of it floating around.

What childishness. Columbia obviously has the right to decide where and how recordings of its teams' games appear online, but was removing that video from YouTube really necessary? Was Columbia losing any money because it was there? Was there an important precedent at stake? Did Columbia have to deny fans, recruits and casual observers -- not to mention Egee's family and Egee himself -- the chance to relive that great moment online?

The answer is obvious. Which might explain why there are plenty of other Ivy League basketball clips on YouTube -- some from games that were broadcast, some from games that were not. Those clips have stayed there for years, unmolested. Why this one was judged to be so damaging, I don't know.

If athletic administrators want to spend their man-hours policing YouTube, that's their right. But erasing the memory of Egee's shot -- a game-winning, Columbia-beating shot -- just reeks of sour grapes.