They came, they saw, they squashed.

Last weekend's National Intercollegiate Squash Racquets Association (NISRA) Team Tournament featured a level of intrigue not seen in many years, at least from Harvard's point of view.

As in each of the previous seven years, the Harvard men's squash team emerged with the Potter Trophy in hand, effectively crowning it national champion. Like last year, it did so with a tight 5-4 victory over rival Trinity.

But for the first time in recent memory, Harvard's players tasted the sweetness of winning a tournament in which it entered as the underdog. The Trinity Bantams, who entered the tournament No. 1, earned their lofty ranking two weeks earlier when they snapped the Crimson's 89-match win streak with a 6-3 victory.

So Sunday's Tournament Final was about revenge, and a national championship to boot.

"It came down to who wanted it more, and I think we proved it was us," said captain Daniel Ezra, who avenged his earlier loss to defending national singles champion Marcus Cowie with a 3-0 victory at the No. 1 spot. "I'm just totally ecstatic."

Ezra's emotional victory topped a four-match winning streak by the Crimson, who opened the finale down 2-0. Harvard had rolled over Denison, 9-0, in the Tournament's opening round, then netted a 6-3 win over a strong Amherst team.

But the players knew that the true test would come against the Bantams.

"We always knew that Trinity would be our toughest competition, but having played them earlier we knew what we had to do to beat them," freshman No. 6 Andrew Merrill said.

It was Merrill's win which put the Crimson on the board, overcoming a 2-1 deficit in the best-of-five to win, 3-2. Classmate Deepak Abraham, Harvard's No. 4, followed with a come-from-behind triumph of his own, 3-1, to a player who had beaten him two weeks before.

A 3-1 win by sophomore No. 9 Eric Lauer, also playing someone to whom he had lost during the regular season, gave Harvard its first overall lead, 3-2, and set up Ezra's match.

Could a third-straight Harvard player vindicate a regular-season loss? Could he do it against someone who, as a freshman, beat him out for last year's singles title? Could he do it without so much as dropping a game?

Ezra's resounding answer: Yes, yes and yes.

"Daniel Ezra's performance was masterful," Harvard Coach Bill Doyle said. "[Cowie] is a great physical player who has a lot of presence on the court and does a lot of talking between points. He tries to intimidate, but I don't think Daniel was intimidated."

Down 14-11 in the first-to-15 opening game, Ezra stormed back to win 17-15. After the heartbreaker Cowie seemed spent for the next two games, and Ezra cruised 15-4 and 15-7.