Sometimes you just have to say, "What the heck."

And for the Harvard men's basketball team, Monday night might well be one of those times.

Because on Monday night, the men cagers will find themselves in Durham, N.C., facing the Duke Blue Devils before an intimate (sell-out) gathering of 8564 at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Just to review some facts about the foregoing:

* Duke is 16-2 and the second-ranked team in the country. Its only two losses have been to the first-ranked North Carolina and fourth-ranked Georgia Tech.

* Harvard is 3-10 and in last place in the Ivy League.

* Duke, through its first 15 games, had 28 dunks (the very fact that somebody at Duke keeps track of that statistic should tell you a lot). No Crimson cager has recorded a dunk in the past two seasons.

What the heck.

To get a very rough handle on this contest, consider a common opponents chain. In the middle of December, the Crimson fell to Manhattan College, 81-69. Several weeks later, North Carolina embarrassed Manhattan, 129-45, in one of the worst defeats in NCAA history. And last weekend, the Tar Heels squeaked by Duke at home, 95-92.

Now, if you accept that Manhattan is 12 points better than Harvard (which is probably not true), that UNC is 84 points better than Manhattan (which may well be true), and that North Carolina is three points superior to Duke (again, possible), then Duke should beat Harvard by, oh, 93 points.

Oops.

And while it's highly unlikely that the Crimson will actually lose by 93 points, that might be the order of magnitude we're talking here.

"I'm not going to occupy my time with fairy tales," Harvard Coach Pete Roby said. "I'm a realist, and I know this is going to be a very, very, very difficult game for us. I'm not concerned with the outcome as much as how we play.

"As I've said all along, you don't prepare for Brandeis any different than you prepare for Duke," added Roby, whose cagers host the Judges tomorrow before journeying to Durham. "When you start doing that [preparing differently], you become inconsistent."

And no team in the country can afford to be inconsistent against the Blue Devils. "We have to play a perfect game to stay in the game," Crimson forward Neil Phillips said. "We want to see what we can do against a couple of All-Americans."