Harvard, Yale, And One Last Game At The Palestra

An Ivy League men's basketball championship game is something like a lunar eclipse. It occurs often enough to be seen every couple of years, rarely enough for it to be mesmerizing in the moment, and quietly enough that most people forget to pay attention to it. The conference season "is" the tournament, according to Ivy League parlance, but it does allow for a one-game playoff in a neutral site should that season-long "tournament" produce co-champions.

The last time this happened, in 2011, a buzzer-beater by Princeton's Douglas Davis denied Harvard their first NCAA bid since 1946. The next time it happened was Saturday, at Philadelphia's storied and frankly musty Palestra, where a crowd of 5,256 gathered on short notice to see Harvard eke out a 53-51 victory, and in so doing win their fourth straight NCAA Tournament bid. It was, all told, more fun than watching a bunch of Ivy Leaguers fight had any right to be.

Yale entered Saturday in much the same position that Harvard was in four years ago; the Bulldogs had not appeared in the NCAAs since 1962, though they have shared the Ivy League championship on several occasions. The closest Yale had come to March Madness in recent years was in 2002, when they beat Princeton in one play-in game only to lose to Penn in another. This is not including this season, when a buzzer-beating tip-in by Dartmouth's Fightin' Dinesh D'Souzas—such are the indignities of life in the Ivy—denied Yale an outright conference win.

And so on the last weekend of the college basketball season, as it has for almost 90 years, the Palestra—a brick cathedral by the Schuylkill River, next to the equally venerable Franklin Field—hosted a college basketball game. As neutral sites go, none is more convincing or compelling as a shrine—the Palestra is a museum of basketball with a pronounced Philly accent, complete with photos of and plaques dedicated to anyone and everyone close to Philadelphia basketball, from Wilt Chamberlain and "The Owl Without A Vowel" Bill Mlkvy, to Kerry Kittles to Chris Ford. The entire Big Five used to play here, but even as merely the full-time site for Penn basketball it is a great place to see a game.

The near-religious dedication to sports at the Palestra can sometimes give way to more outright somberness. A memorial service was held there earlier in the day for police officer Robert Wilson III, gunned down the previous week during a robbery at a GameStop. This is the kind of place in which a hard-fought basketball game can follow a funeral almost immediately; the Palestra is not large, but it is capacious enough on a late winter day to house both joy and grief on varying levels.

This was not a joyful season in the Palestra, on balance. Penn was a young team, with no senior starters and an inexperienced leader in Jerome Allen, who was tasked with reclaiming some of the magic he made as a player at the school in the mid-'90s; he was let go at the end of the season. Last Tuesday, in what were supposed to be the last games at the Palestra this season, Princeton dominated Penn 73-52 and the Lady Tigers completed a perfect regular season against Penn's women's squad earlier in the evening. It felt like a fitting end for a dreary season in Philadelphia basketball, but while there was no saving the Philadelphia part of it—only Villanova, among the city's Big Five, cracked the field of 68, with Temple being the consensus 69th team—there was, at least, one more game.

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The few thousand who could get tickets (or, alternately, be bothered) entered to the inevitable sounds of "Uptown Funk." Lines formed everywhere for both pregame trips to the john and halftime meals. From the north press box, Penn banners obscure the American flag; the banners of Temple and St. Joseph's cover up the video screen. There is only you, the thousands of fans and the game.

Harvard gained the early momentum, leading 9-0 before succumbing to the general ebb and flow of a close match-up between two rivals. While Yale led at the half, the evenly divided arena was louder at the Harvard end throughout the game, alive with bratty "Safety School" chants and a more general sense of purpose. After a whimsical halftime which included the most one-sided tricycle race ever, Harvard turned a four-point halftime deficit into a small but comfortable lead, which peaked with 6:19 to go and the Crimson up 46-37. Yale went 6-for-22 in field goals in the back end, which made their late surge that much more impressive and explains the weirdness and prototypically college basketball-ish shape of the game that much more clearly.

There came a point when Harvard's single-digit lead still seemed insurmountable and the game on a glide path toward the exit, but Justin Sears and the rest of the Bulldogs got hot again, and all of a sudden Javier Duren has made six free throws in the last four minutes. Yale will fizzle out, it seems, but then the Bulldogs are down three, then one and then Yale is suddenly up one and are 94 seconds away from their first trip to the big dance since a Wake Forest team featuring Billy Fucking Packer AS A PLAYER defeated them at this very building 53 years ago.

It's dramatic, or is until a conflict ensues about what could've been the go-ahead basket from Harvard's Wesley Saunders. It takes a moment to break Yale's heart, and another for Saunders to get the and-one. Javier Duren has to make two shots to tie it up for Yale with 54.6 seconds left, and does. With 33.2 seconds left and Crimson ball, Harvard is beating Yale, 51-51. The whole Palestra stood when Saunders passed it to Steve Moundou-Missi for the game winner, and when Javier Duren tried to tie it up again for Yale, and came up short.

"My body was in it," said Duren of his last attempt to tie the game. Duren knew it was his last shot at making the NCAA tournament, but was happy to be there, and proud about his parents driving fourteen hours from St. Louis to Philadelphia. "It's kind of my philosophy to let the play run," added Yale coach James Jones when asked about not calling the timeout after the game winning shot. "I look forward to more basketball this season. It's not over yet and I hope we get invited to the NIT."

Needless to say, Jones came out in favor of a conference tournament. "No disrespect to the Palestra," he joked, "[But[ I would've played this outside." Harvard coach Tommy Amaker was a little more respectful of the one-game playoff format, from which he had experienced both joy and defeat.

"I think we've all seen the history and tradition of the conference and how great it's been without a tournament," Amaker said, with a Harvard-appropriate attempt at victorious equanimity. "There's a reasonable argument that could be made towards thinking about it different going forward. But this afternoon is another showcase of maybe having the [playoff game] when the teams tie, another reason to keep it as is."

Any further basketball James Jones and his team will enjoy this season will be on TV. Yale was left out of the NIT, CBI and even the mid-major exclusive CIT, where the Bulldogs were runners-up last season; they were just good enough to have their hearts broken three times in a little over a week. Harvard, a 13 seed, will face North Carolina on the first day of the tournament, and attempt to win at least one game in it for the third year in a row. Whether or not anyone needs more postseason basketball—more conference tournaments, more teams in the NCAAs, more CBIs, NITs or CITs—no fan will argue against the basketball played in the Palestra on Saturday.

Fluke though it was, the Ivy play-in was a fantasy of March basketball in ultra-condensed microcosm—a small arena awash in rivalry vibes, a close games in which the outcome is never definite. It was basketball as it most fully is, the big and little moments that define it. There was also a one-sided tricycle race. All of it felt right, and very much at home in March.