The first, and lasting, images are of victory.

Ed Krayer backhanding in The Goal. Bill Cleary dancing in celebration on the St. Paul Civic Center ice. Ed Presz lofting the Beanpot into the air.

Dave Berkoff, gold medal around his neck, smiling on a television broadcast from Seoul. Travis Metz wet and shivering on the banks of Lake Quinsigamond after an Eastern Sprints win.

It is easy to be blinded by the glare of the gold medal. To remember St. Paul, Minn., and forget Cambridge, Mass.

It is easy to forget the other images, the more common images, of this year in Harvard sports. Those are images of frustration and disappointment. Images of teams that started the season with so much promise and finished with so many unanswered questions.

Two basketball players holding a tearful vigil at Briggs Cage following the final loss in their final season. The devastation on the football players' faces as they walked out of The Stadium following a lost Game and a lost season. Two senior soccer players, heads down and spikes flung over the shoulders, leaving Ohiri Field without an NCAA bid for the first time in three years.

Expectations were high for this year's crop of Crimson athletes. In 1987-88, Harvard had captured a record 12 Ivy titles for the third time in the decade. This year's teams were expected to bring home even more.

It didn't happen.

The Crimson may have finished with its first NCAA title in 85 years, but it only won five Ivy titles and a trio of Eastern crew crowns.

The teams that won come as no surprise--both hockey programs repeated as league champions, as did women's swimming, squash, and women's lacrosse. And crew victories--the men's and women's heavyweights and the men's lightweights all won at Eastern Sprints--are certainly not unusual or unexpected. No, the surprises came from those teams which didn't win--the teams which had skill, but could not find success.

It wasn't for lack of trying. The heartbreak and frustration was evident on many faces. There just weren't any answers.

Ivy ring on his finger, senior Greg Ubert couldn't explain what happened to the football team last fall. The magical 1987 Ivy championship season was followed by a miserable bottom-of-the-pack outing.

In mid-October, Harvard watched as it took only two sloppy snaps to give Cornell a 19-17 victory at The Stadium. By mid-November, the Big Red was 8-2 and Ivy champs. Harvard was 2-8 and sharing sixth place with Columbia.

Six months later, there were no answers for the problems that plagued the Harvard baseball team, leaving Ubert with his second sub-.500 season in a year that began with hopes for not one, but two league titles.

Ubert was far from the only senior athlete with shattered dreams. Sarah Duncan is the proud owner of two Ivy championship rings. For Duncan, a forward on the women's basketball team, playing Dartmouth for the Ivy title in the final game of the season is almost a ritual.