If she had hung around, she would have seen Harvard play three more matches, all as exciting as the Crimson's defeat of Yale.
Princeton heard the news of Yale's defeat but could not believe it; some of the players muttered, "No way."
Princeton may have been a doubter, but Cornell soon became a believer.
At 5:30, the Crimson squared-off against Cornell. Before the match, a Cornell starter was telling some of her friends that after her team beat Harvard, it would play the loser of the Princeton-Penn match. Her friends are probably still waiting for that Cornell-Princeton showdown.
The Crimson dropped two of the first three sets, but Harvard Co-Captains Maia Forman and Jodi Cassell and the rest of the team kept telling each other that victory was possible.
With the bench screaming, the Crimson fought back to take the next two sets.
Back at the hotel, the players ordered pizza, and Lem stayed in his room, watching, appropriately, "Hoosiers." Lem could not help but make the comparison between the underdogs in the movie and his underdog squad.
Harvard was a team that the critics expected to be out of the tournament, just like the high school basketball team in "Hoosiers" was expected to go nowhere. Like the team in "Hoosiers", the Crimson was smaller than its opponents.
Before the Harvard-Princeton match Sunday, the gymnasium looked more like Stillman infirmary. Several players walked around with blisters on their feet, the price of playing three matches the previous day. The team had bought a can of band-aids the night before. All the band-aids were in use.
The place smelled of Ben Gay.
Despite the adversity, the Crimson managed to capture the first and second sets against Princeton. But Harvard could not hold on. The team dropped the next two sets and then fell in the deciding set, 15-13.
The Crimson came two points away from a final no one expected it to be even close to.
The last play of the game seemed to capture the team's tournament performance. Forman, who is 5-ft., 4-in. and Manda Schossberger who is 5-ft., 7-in., went up for a block against Princeton's 6-ft., 1-in. Kelly Slatterly.
The ball was tipped all the way past the backcourt line, and freshman Carolyn Burger dove for the ball. It was just out of reach.