The Harvard cross-country team ran its best race this season in yesterday's Heptagonals meet, but the opposition proved tougher, as Princeton edged the Crimson out of first place, 65-71, thus snaring the top slot in the Ivy League track listings.

Dartmouth also ran a tough race, coming in third with a team score of 84, followed closely by Penn with a tally of 86.

After Penn, the order of finish was Navy, Army, Columbia, Cornell, Yale, and Brown, with scores in the range of 106-262.

Kurt Alitz of Army took the individual title, by blazing across the finish line number one with a time of 24:13.

The top Harvard finishes were freshman Reed Eichner, who came in sixth at 24:59, number seven Stein Rafto at 25:00, Pete Fitzsimmons, number eight at 25:02, and Jeff Campbell, who finished 15th at 25:12.

The Crimson harriers ran an extremely fast first mile in the race, which was held at Van Cortland Park in New York City, but were unable to stay with the leaders for the remainder of the race.

Harvard runner Stein Rafto cannonballed down the relatively straight-and-narrow first mile of the course, and was one of the top four when he breezed across the mile mark at 4:32. Teammates Reed Eichner, Pete Fitzsimmons, and Jeff Campbell were not far behind, and at this point only Dartmouth, Princeton, and Penn posed any real threat.

But the second mile-and-one-half of the Van Cortland course was hilly and uneven, and this caused problems for the Harvard team as the pace began to quicken. Campbell and sophomore Marc Meyer suffered in particular, and began to drop back even as they both continued to run one of their strongest races of the season.

For the last half of the race, the Crimson was forced to play catch-up, and responded strongly to the challenge. Eichner, Rafto, and Fitzsimmons drove hard for the last mile and one-half, and all missed passing the number two Princeton man by four seconds or less.