Sex, drugs, rock and roll and all that other bad stuff was far, far away--across 96th Street, that is. Blight was a problem only in the abstract, a construct of my parents' liberal imaginations.

I got into Harvard early, so the college process was more like a formality. When I finally got here, I slipped comfortably into my niche, writing sports articles and loving it.

And for the last four years, I have been the boy in the Ivy bubble.

Every beat I have covered here has been wildly successful. It began with women's basketball my freshman year.

I love women's hoops almost as much as I love men's, and that was not nearly the case four years ago. But Ethan Drogin '98 convinced me to join him and Eduardo Perez-Giz '99 covering the up-and-coming women's basketball team, which Ethan said would be a lot more fun than the six-win men's team. He was right.

Both teams improved over their 1994-95 performances, the women to the tune of the first of three straight Ivy League titles. More than just a thoroughly dominating team, the women's hoopsters and their down-to-earth coach, Kathy Delaney-Smith, have proven among the most accessible performers I have ever encountered.

Along with Ethan and "Giz," I tagged along for the team's undefeated 1996-97 Ivy season and won a free trip to North Carolina to cover a game, a loss, to Marion Jones and the Tar Heels. I then wandered fortuitously into the team's magical 1997-98 season, witnessing each record shattered by Allison Feaster '98, as well as the historic upset of top-seeded Stanford in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

I even got to see my personal heroine Jamila Wideman sitting at a Palo Alto pizza bar. So what if I missed a couple of midterms? Jamila Wideman!

Women's basketball is only the beginning. No one wanted to cover Harvard baseball in 1996, and not just because the team finished last in the Ivy's Red Rolfe division the previous year. If you have ever been to O'Donnell Field (given the baseball team's overwhelming success the last four years, too many of you have not), you have felt the crosswinds of the Charles River rip through your bones and turn an erstwhile pleasant spring afternoon into a Jack London story.

Frothing over with all the naive energy of a first-year baseball nut, I was no more aware of Allston's mercurial weather patterns or Harvard baseball's poor track record than of the learned arts of "mailing in" response papers or putting a smile on a TF's face during section.

Some would say it is my luck that my arrival coincided with that of prodigious Harvard baseball Coach Joe Walsh; I would like to think that the luck is all his. Give the credit where you want, but the team turned around that year, winning the division and coming a few bounces of the ball and a May thunderstorm away from winning the Ivy League title.

I covered baseball each of the two years after '96, each year the team won the Ivy title and the NCAA play-in series, and won two games in the tournament, both times shocking a higher-seeded team in the process. The price was spending most of my April and May weekends with mild hypothermia, but the weather only lends flavor to my memories.

The only other sport I covered extensively for more than one year was football, and again, my beat coverage took the shape of Dante's Divine Comedy, or perhaps better stated, Groom's Forrest Gump. I shared the football beat with current Co-Sports Editor Bryan Lee in 1997, and that year the football team had its first-ever perfect Ivy League season and recorded its most wins since 1919.

College has worked for me.

Over my four years with The Crimson, I covered games at seven of the eight Ivy League schools (no love to Columbia). I met Leigh Montville and Nancy Darsch. I stormed the field of the Yale Bowl and watched it being stormed from a frigid press box. My eyes took in the wondrous rolling hills of San Francisco while my body was on the clock.