Kyle Wente is alive and well, starting at guard for the Princeton Tigers. But his ghost continues to haunt the Harvard men’s basketball team.

The date was Feb. 10, 2001. After his 29 points lifted Harvard to a historic victory over Penn the night before, Dan Clemente hit a crucial jumper to put Harvard ahead of Princeton 67-66 with seven seconds left to play. But on the next trip down the floor, Wente hit an awkward, off-balance three-pointer at the buzzer, sending the Crimson into a tailspin. Harvard dropped its next four games and fell out of the running for the Ivy League title.

Ten months later, the Crimson is 4-1 through its first five games. So why does this shot continue to haunt Harvard hoopsters?

“A loss like that hurts. I’m not going to lie. Things just fell apart,” junior guard Brady Merchant said.

Indeed, Harvard’s subsequent collapse was perhaps more painful than the loss itself.

“It had a lot to do with mental toughness, mental focus,” junior guard Elliott Prasse-Freeman said. “After a really emotional loss like that, a championship-caliber team bounces back and dusts itself off and comes back the next day. Not to say we didn’t have guys who really wanted to win, we just didn’t have the mental toughness. We let it slip just enough to let it spiral in on itself.”

Clemente—Harvard’s captain, its go-to guy and the school’s third all-time leading scorer—has since graduated. But while Clemente, the heart of last year’s team, is gone, the Crimson is hardly a Tin Man.

“We obviously miss Dan—he was a great scorer, a great leader to have on our team,” Harvard captain Andrew Gellert said. “By the same token, everybody’s a year older, more experienced, and we’ve got [senior center] Tim Coleman back. We’re playing well as a team, that’s what’s important. I don’t want to compare ourselves to last year.”

Harvard veteran guards Patrick Harvey, Gellert and Prasse-Freeman have more than enough talent and resolve to put last year’s late-season woes behind them. The backcourt trio is Harvard’s main offensive weapon and the glue that holds the team together.

“Having three guards provides a matchup problem for other teams,” said Harvey, a 5’10 junior from Chicago, Ill. “It allows us to create opportunities for our frontcourt as well.”

Long-range shooting will remain a big part of the Crimson offense. Last year’s squad set a school record with 203 treys, leading the Ivy League in three-point percentage. Harvey led the way with a superb 41 percent from behind the arc, while Prasse-Freeman and Merchant were close by at 37 and 36 percent respectively.

But the Harvard guards aren’t the only Crimson players who can hit from long-range—Harvard’s big guys can shoot as well. Senior center Tim Coleman, who sat out last season, hit 11 threes in the 1999-2000 season, and junior forward Sam Winter has also shown some capability from outside.

“The fact that our big guys—Sammy and Timmy—can both shoot threes, means that all our starting five, and our first guy off the bench—Brady [Merchant]—are really good three-point shooters,” Prasse-Freeman says. “That means that even if there’s a shot blocker or even if they clog the lane on us, we’re hopefully able to dissect defenses that way.”

Still, Harvard knows that threes alone cannot win championships.

“If you live by the three, you die by it as well,” Prasse-Freeman says. “We need to go inside more. We need to get to the foul line more. We need to be more aggressive.”