Senior center Rose Janowski has always been fascinated by big gyms.

During her middle school days in Glover, Vt., she always loved traveling to arch-rival Barton's larger facility, a giant leap up from Glover's tiny gym, a converted town hall.

"The baskets were maybe a foot and a half beneath the ceiling, so you had to shoot straight on to make a basket," she says.

One of Janowski's fondest high school basketball memories is at the end of her junior year, when her team made it to the state quarterfinals-and lost.

"We got to play in the big, state gym where the final round was," she says. "It was the coolest thing, but we didn't get any farther any of the other years."

Maples Pavilion in Palo Alto, with its vibrating parquet and passionate, maroon-decked faithful, is a big-gym fetishist's fantasy. So when the Harvard women's basketball team marched into Maples for its first-round NCAA Tournament game against topseeded Stanford last season, Janowski was on cloud nine even before her team waltzed out with the biggest victory in its history.

"I feel like it was all a blur," she says. "I remember coming onto the floor for warm-ups, and it was just deafening; I could not hear a thing. I remember the last 30 seconds, looking up at the clock and going, 'Wow,' kind of being stunned. We screamed so loud that night. I don't think I've ever been more excited in my life."

Life for Janowski was a dream. And one day later, she woke up.

Stomach pains had plagued Janowski during practices leading up to the game, and they returned Sunday, the day after the upset. That evening, as the team enjoyed a victory dinner in San Francisco, Janowski could barely walk.

"I had no idea what was going on," Janowski says. "It felt like somebody was poking my guts and twisting them around."

Unfortunately, what Janowski felt was not terribly far from the truth. A small, benign ovarian cyst that had developed weeks before had shifted into a position where it was aggravating her Fallopian tube and cutting off blood flow.

That night the pain was so great that it caused her to go into mild shock. Athletic Trainer Maura McCarthy and Dr. Wilbur Boike-father of thenfreshman guard Kristen Boike-tended to Janowski and called an ambulance. She was eventually taken to Stanford Medical Center.

"[Janowski] was really pale, and she said she was having immense pains," says junior Laela Sturdy, who was Janowski's roommate that night at Stanford. "She wasn't passed out, but she was really not doing well. It was one of the scariest things, to see your teammate in that much pain and not know what's going on."

A cyst the size of "a deflated basketball" had postponed Janowski's freshman campaign nearly three years earlier. Now, one day after the best day of her basketball life, Janowski found herself on the verge of one of the worst.

"My doctor had told me that there was another cyst, but it was only small and that it wasn't going to bother me if I went out and played, so I didn't think of it," she says. "The night before the ambulance came, the thought flashed through my mind that it might be [the cyst]. But I thought, 'It's so small, what's it going to do?' I didn't really have that thought until I went into the emergency room and they started asking me questions about my history."