Last spring, on a dark, rainy afternoon in April, Bill Forbush scored in the final minutes of play to give the Crimson stick-men a stunning, come-from-behind win over the Princeton Tigers, 11-10.

Down 10-6 late in the third quarter, Harvard overcame the mud and the favored Princeton laxmen to notch the last five tallies of the contest. As the Crimson players danced for joy in the driving rain after the final gun, no one who was there could help but think, "wait 'til next year, this is just the beginning."

The happy fact was, more than half of Harvard's players were freshmen or sophomores, and anyone who followed Harvard lacrosse had heard the rumors that Crimson coach Bob Scalise had attracted for the next season the finest freshman crop in recent memory.

Despite the disappointing losses that came later that spring to Brown and UMass, the season was a stirring success. Splitting its six Ivy League games and finishing 10-5 overall, the squad had its first winning record and best Ivy finish since 1971, and the most wins in more than a decade.

A small but talented contingent of seniors, led by Kevin McCall, Billy Tennis, and Mike Belmont, graduated in June, but a bevy of lettermen returned this year, and there was always that sterling batch of rookies.

Scalise pointed to a spot in the nation's top ten as the team's 1977 goal, and a shot at the eight-team NCAA tournament looked possible.

That was just two months ago. Saturday, one short year after Harvard edged Princeton to highlight a happy season, the Tigers destroyed the Crimson, 17-7. It was Harvard's third straight loss, coming after the laxmen had misfired against a top-ranked but flat Cornell squad, 12-5, and been upset by hapless Yale, 13-10. That was the Elis' only Ivy triumph in the last two years.

The Crimson, the loser of six of its first ten games, must now beat ninth-ranked UMass Saturday and then get by Williams and Dartmouth simply to salvage a winning record. A loss in Hanover would throw Harvard into the Ivy league cellar alongside Yale.

Now, no one who follows the team can help but ask, "What happened?" As one might expect, there are many answers.

First, it is clear that we all were just a little too optimistic. A number of the players said Sunday that the coaching staff had expected too much, too soon from the young players. "Everybody said we would be good," Jerry Keleher said, "but it wasn't really founded on anything."

And it took a string of 1977 losses before the true value of last year's seniors became fully clear. In Billy Tennis and Kevin McCall, Harvard had lost more than two high-scoring players. The team had lost the stickmen who had been counted on, game in and game out, to take the ball and make something happen when everyone else was just standing around.

On paper, three-year starter Chico MacKenzie, who will finish high on the career scoring list and currently leads the team with 26 goals, figured to fill that role for the Crimson this time around.

Take Advantage

But the high-scoring senior is the crease attackman; his job is to move without the ball and to take the best advantage of opportunities when they come his way. He is not in a position to take charge when the game starts to slip away. Several members of the team also mentioned that Chico just isn't the kind of player, personality-wise, to fill that role.

So, Harvard has shown its inexperience all too clearly. Senior stars like Eamon McEneaney at Cornell and Princeton's Dave Tickner and Wicky Sollers have taken complete control of games Harvard lost badly, and old-hands Pete Hollis and Mike Page of Penn took charge of a close game when it really mattered, giving the Quakers an 11-9 win over the Crimson in the final minutes.