I hope it’s not too late for me to jump back on the bandwagon.

After brushing off a deflating two-point loss to Princeton Friday night, the Harvard men’s basketball team came up with its most impressive performance in several years in knocking off Penn 78-75 in overtime Saturday.

Even though the weekend series against the Ivies’ top two teams resulted in a split, any Harvard fan at the sold-out Lavietes Pavilion Saturday evening would tell you that Harvard looked like the best team in the league. Hot shooting, key defensive stops and poise under pressure all erased the sour memories left from last season’s home weekend, when Princeton’s Kyle Wente hit a miracle three-point shot in the final second to deny the Crimson a sweep.

And for Harvard, beating Penn at home was not only revenge for last year’s 70-47 drubbing at the Palestra. It was also a wake-up call to the rest of the conference that Harvard won’t likely be living up to its preseason selection as just the sixth-best team in the league.

The win also won me back over as a believer in the Crimson’s true play-making ability, especially at home. I had been down on the team after last year’s stumbling finish. A horrific loss at BU earlier this season, where Harvard only managed to score 41 points and was often confused on the offensive end, further confirmed my fears that it was going to be a long season with little chance of a top-half finish in the Ancient Eight. Even two straight wins over Ivy League punching-bag Dartmouth did not convince me.

So entering the weekend, I held out very little hope of seeing anything close to last year’s Penn-Princeton weekend, when a Dan Clemente-led Crimson squad knocked out the Quakers 77-62 before losing on Wente’s prayer the next night.

If anything, I thought the only team Harvard had a chance of beating was defending league champion Princeton, who had been the weaker of the two “killer P’s” during non-conference play. Penn, on the other hand, was (and still is) the feel-good mid-major story of the year. Its victories over big-time programs Georgia Tech, Iowa State, Villanova and Temple, along with close losses to Illinois and St. Joe’s, had given the Quakers national celebrity and even a few votes in the Associated Press Top 25 poll.

Harvard, on the other hand, fell in around No. 200 in the national RPI rankings.

To Penn’s credit, the Quakers knew Saturday’s matchup would be a tough game.

“We always have a difficult time up here,” Penn Coach Fran Dunphy said. “We would have been surprised if we came up here and hammered Harvard.”

Good teams show their true colors in big games. For the Crimson, no two games are bigger than hosting Penn and Princeton. The close loss followed by the close overtime win answered three questions that had been raised about Harvard this season:

(1) Patrick Harvey is without a doubt a big-game player. Where Clemente was a guaranteed 25-point scorer in big games, Harvey, playing at the tough two-guard position, has emerged as Harvard’s most clutch player. Last season, as a sophomore, Harvey won two Ivy contests for Harvard—against Dartmouth and Columbia—in the closing seconds.

This season, Harvey has been the Crimson’s leading scorer in all but two games. His only mistake this weekend may have been a turnover in the last minute of regulation versus Penn, which allowed the Quakers’ Andrew Toole to hit a fast-break layup and tie the game. Otherwise, Harvey had 43 combined points this weekend, and his stretch of 15 straight points put the Crimson, and the crowd, back into the game.

Harvey is such a cool customer that, when asked after the Penn game how the team responded to Penn’s 14-0 run in the second half, he replied, “They had a 14-0 run on us? Really?”

(2) Harvard does have a bench. Prior to this season, and even up to this past weekend, the Crimson’s depth has been (and could yet be) a question mark. Last year’s sole freshman, Kam Walton, is no longer with the team, and the four freshmen Sullivan brought in this season were largely unknown. Harvard’s only proven bench players were junior guard Brady Merchant and last year’s starting center, junior Brian Sigafoos.