As if things weren't bad enough.

It started when the Harvard base ball team fell short of its third straight Eastern League championship by losing to Princeton Saturday, 5-1.

It got a lot worse yesterday, when the NCAA announced the Division I regional pairing. The Tigers, get this are going to Miami, not rainy Orono Maine, where Harvard played the last two years.

Maine lost the ECAC North tournament to La Salle. So the Eastern League Champion, which should have been-no, could have been-Harvard, gets to travel to Florida for the Weekend.

If it's any consolation, the Tigers (29-10) probably won't last long. They play host Miami (56-14) in the first round of the four-team double-elimination tournament.

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Of the 38 teams with a shot at making the eight-team College World Series Princeton is arguably the premier academic institution. Arguably, because Stanford, cal, Michigan and Virginia are all still in the hunt for the national championship.

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The crimson had a great year, going 29-9 for an impressive .763 winning percentage. Only 11 of the 38 regional invitees had better winning percentages, and only a few noninvitees had better records-Navy (27-5-1, .833) and Baylor (42-11, .792), for example.

Don't feel too cheated, though Harvard, like most northeastern schools, plays one of the easiest Division I schedules in the country. Most of the teams that made it to the regionals are clearly better than the Crimson. Only Western Carolina (35-33) and Lamar (32-22) have winning percentages below 600.

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The Vierra-Rivera-McNamara era is over.

The most successful class of baseball players to hit Cambridge in 10 years fell one game shy of becoming the first back-to-back-to-back champions since the Class of '74 took four straight titles.

The nine seniors on the Harvard baseball team won 27 games as sophomores, 28 games as juniors and 29 games this season. All told, the Crimson went 84-23-1 for a .782 winning percentage over the past three years.

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