I had this title for two years until this past January, after which I became what is known at The Crimson as a "dinosaur," meaning that I'm extinct.

It's a weird job and is best explained in stages.

Stage One is fear. You don't know what you're doing, and if you did, you wouldn't feel capable of doing it. You work tentatively, look at the outgoing editors with a quasi-religious reverence and wonder if everyone would be better off if you quit.

But soon you learn the game, and you enter Stage Two--excitement. You gain confidence in your abilities, and you want to take on more responsibilities and improve the sports page in every way imaginable. You're having a lot of fun.

Later, however, you get tired. Something goes wrong, you get overwhelmed and you sink down into Stage Three--over-exertion. Harvard has 41 varsity sports and you just CAN'T cover all of them, no matter how often the sailing team (bless their hearts!) e-mails in its results. You're not doing a perfect job, and you feel bad because of it.

Then comes Stage Four, which I like to call acceptance. You see a typo in The Globe or something, and you realize that no one's perfect and that we just do the best we can. And we're not going to cover everything, but we're going to give it our best shot.

The problem is, this comes across all too often as resignation or embitterment. For instance, say you get some sailing results, and you're honestly going to try to assign a story, but you know in your heart that none of your writers are going to take it. Someone will ask you why you're so pessimistic, and...you'd like to explain, but you have work to do that night, so you don't. And that someone will walk away, muttering about how jaded you are.

In this way, Stage Four can also be called loneliness. That's why I have the highest respect for everyone who has done the job while I've been here--John Trainer, Sean Wissman, Dave Griffel, Matt Howitt, Ethan Drogin and Becky Blaeser. And that's why we all continued to cover our beats--otherwise, we'd go crazy.

* * *

This game was going to be a laugher, right? Right?

I mean, Penn was Penn, and Harvard was Harvard. So throughout the first half, I was waiting for the Quakers to blow the Crimson away, thinking, "It's going to happen any second now...any second..."

It didn't. Mike Gilmore '96 kept nailing his outside shots, and guards Tarik Campbell '94 and Jared Leake '95 played spectacular defense on Maloney and Allen.

Penn led by a couple points at halftime but never pulled away. As I realized that this was going to be a barnburner, my nervousness turned into a rush of adrenaline.

* * *

Ah, my beats. Field hockey, men's basketball and women's lacrosse.