CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Shortly after beating Pennsylvania to destroy its hopes of an Ivy League championship, Princeton forward Patrick Saunders fired off a text message to Keith Wright, a friend and erstwhile rival at Harvard.
“It just said, ‘You’re welcome,’” Wright said Wednesday, a day after the Tigers helped Harvard clinch its first-ever solo Ivy title. “I feel like they owed us one.”
A year after Princeton shared the conference championship with the Crimson and beat them in a one-game tiebreaker to earn the league’s NCAA berth, the Tigers beat Penn to help Harvard reach the tournament for the first time since 1946.
“I knew they weren’t going to go down without a fight,” said Wright, who is friends not only with Saunders but with Doug Davis, the Princeton guard who hit the game-winning shot in last year’s tiebreaker with 2.8 seconds to play. “Two-point-eight seconds. It was something we would say all the time: 2.8 seconds is what kept us from the tournament.”
Said Harvard guard Brandyn Curry: “I instantly forgave them for hitting that shot against us last year.”
Harvard had never won an Ivy League title before last year’s shared championship, and the school raised a banner commemorating that title in the Lavietes Pavilion. Beside it is a long, black banner marking the school’s appearances in the NCAA tournament.
It lists 1946 and then a whole lot of blank space.
