One of your roommates never returned from Thanksgiving break. Another one took off for Puerto Rico on Sunday, and the third left last night taking the stereo with him, despite your last minute pleas for mercy.

So there you sit, soaking in the last rays of heat which will emanate from the radiator until 1977, listening to the stolen HSA refrigerator shudder and rattle, and staring at the jungle of plants which were left for you to water. (Either you have more friends than you thought or those spider plants multiply faster than a bowl of guppies.)

You see, last spring your parents moved and forgot to send you one of those post office change-of-address forms so you are looking at two weeks of walking the Freedom Trail, discovering what is at the other end of the Red Line and eating Elsie's Specials with mayo and onions.

But all is not lost since the basketball and hockey teams will be taking a working vacation. You can catch a few games and when you find frost on all those precious plants one icy morning and run out of toilet paper and can't steal more since the libraries are closed, you can always think of the tough schedules which the Crimson teams are facing.

Satch's batch opens its holiday schedule tomorrow night when it entertains Holy Cross at the IAB. That's the same Holy Cross which is undefeated, ranked number one in New England, and features Puerto Rican Olympian Michael Vicens and Massachusetts schoolboy star Ron Perry Jr.

Whoopin' and Gosh-Darnin'

The hoopsters then travel to South Carolina, as in the Atlantic Coast Conference, for the Carolina Classic. A first round win would mean a matchup with either Georgetown, 17th in Sports Illustrated's top 20, or Alabama, ranked 7th in the AP and UPI basketball polls. And you thought three-foot snow drifts were bad.

How does the Swedish national hockey team strike you? They face-off with the Crimson tonight at 7:30 at Watson Rink, which may be warmer than your room before long. Notre Dame does not provide much of a breather on Monday before the hockey team packs its skates off to the Midwest for games with Minnesota and Wisconsin, perennial powerhouses of the snowy North.

To Dream

They teach you in statistics that nothing is impossible. The New England Patriots believe that. Satch and his crew seem to subscribe to this philosophy and the Harvard icemen probably believe that they can emerge from the vacation unscathed. Who knows, maybe there will be a heat wave in Cambridge.

'Bye Suckers

Well, I'm off to two weeks in the sun, so have a white Christmas sucker, happy Chanukah and maybe there will be a few surprises wrapped in Crimson waiting for Harvard sports fans.