Time had run out on the Harvard men's basketball team some 24 hours before. Now, some had all but run out on Ken Plutnicki.

So with just four tiny clicks of the clock left Saturday night at Briggs Athletic Center, the senior co-captain dunked home the frustrations of the last four years. They were the final points of his Harvard career.

And they were the final points of Harvard's season.

For not even the Crimson's 88-77 drubbing of Columbia before 1100 Saturday could erase the disaster of 24 hours before. That was when Cornell put Harvard's dream of a first-ever Ivy title in serious trouble with a 76-67 upset of the Crimson.

The dream was seriously over when news reached Cambridge that Princeton had defeated Brown Saturday in Princeton to wrap up its second straight league title and the accompanying NCAA tournament berth.

It would have taken a Harvard victory and Princeton and Cornell losses on Saturday just to set up a three-way playoff for the title.

So, instead, Harvard (9-5 in the Ivies) finished just one game behind the 10-4 Tigers, locked in a second-place tie with Cornell-82-66 losers to Dartmouth in Hanover, N.H. in its season finale. And though the second-place finish tied the Crimson's best-ever Ivy effort, it left the cagers searching for more.

A team that began the weekend just a sweep of Cornell and Columbia away from at least a tie for that ever-elusive Ivy crown. Harvard could only dream of what might have been.

"I think our team is still in shock from Friday night," freshman guard Keith Webster said after Saturday night's win. "I don't know if we'll recover from that for a few days."

But in the far corner of the locker room stood Plutnicki, aware that the Ivy title had slipped from his squad's hands and equally aware that he had left a new tradition for his teammates to follow.

"If you look back, we've accomplished a lot," said the forward, who in four years watched the Harvard squad come to the forefront of Ivy men's basketball. "They've got something they can carry on now."

"We definitely left something in the Ivy League that people have to remember," Webster agreed. "People have to know it's going to come down to the last week again next year," Webster added. "Unless we've wrapped it up by then."

The optimism came from a team that will lose just Plutnicki and fellow Co-Captain Monroe Trout-who inexplicably did not play Saturday-and will return five of its top six players. It also came from a team that finished second in the league and beat the champion twice.

"I 'm really proud of them," Harvard Coach frank McLaughlin said as he awaited the score from Princetion.

He just hadn't been too proud of them a few minutes earlier. The Crimson squandered leads of 7-0, 17-11 and 35-27 in the first half and found itself on the short end of a 41-39 score three minutes into the second half of the game that Harvard had to win to keep its tiny title hopes alive.