It really didn't hit me until yesterday morning. I cruised down to 60 Boylston Street to pick up some tickets for the first round of the ECAC playoffs and got all the way up to that classy barred window before I tragically realized it.

The Harvard University (undergraduate college) Ice Hockey Team is not in the playoffs. That's it. It's over. Turn your stuff in guys. Good season George, Billy, Brian, and all you other fellas. Maybe next year, huh Coach Cleary?

I don't know. Somehow I just wasn't prepared for all this.

You may not have noticed it but there's nothing going on now. Just last weekend you could have screamed your head off in the IAB, or last Tuesday you could have cursed out those spoilers in green in Watson Rink, or two weeks ago you could have waved towels and whistled at the swimming pool against Yale, but now you're just not allowed to do that unless you're trying to get into a graduate school for morons.

But don't worry. I know it's a rough time for all of us. Hopefully the following list of suggestons that I've compiled will help us all pass the time and get through this excruciating thaw and onward to the inane, captivating excitement of spring sports:

Catch severe mono from a friend and fall into a coma for a month.

Write ten-page apology letters to Satch and the rest of the basketball team for not going to their final five games.

Get really involved in auto racing.

Get really involved in soap operas (this reporter recommends "All My Children" and "Days of Our Lives").

Take a drive down to Milford every Sunday and go over this past season's football game films with Joe Restic and his aides.

Start sewing a baseball hat big enough to fit Reggie Jackson's head.

Get permission to sit in on all of baseball coach Loyal Park's "brief" meetings with his pitchers and catchers.

Go down to the University Health Services for a checkup. It'll be lacrosse season by the time they call your name.

Take a can of Endust and a dry mop and dust off Briggs Cage.

Learn the words to the Harvard fight songs instead of the drunken slurring hum-along that you do now when they're played.