Until he does it again, Harvard forward Sam Winter’s monster slam against Brown Friday night should be known as “The Dunk.”

With just under 40 seconds remaining in the second half, Brown’s G.J. King missed a crucial pair of free throws that could have brought the Bears to within six points. Instead, the Crimson pushed the ball quickly upcourt to junior point guard Elliott Prasse-Freeman, who never met an assist he didn’t like. Prasse-Freeman saw that Winter had slipped behind the defense and threw a quick flash pass.

Half a second later, Winter was stuffing the ball in the face of a few Brown defenders, getting fouled in the process and putting the Crimson up 85-75. But it’s what happened immediately after that gives a new meaning to the term “Slammin’ Sammy.”

Winter, not known as a guy who wears his emotion on his sleeves (after all, he’s from Kansas), hopped over to the sidelines, where it seemed like the entire student cheering section was waiting to slap him five. He obliged.

“The atmosphere was great tonight,” Winter said. “Great energy out there.”

Which is an understatement. Lavietes Pavilion was packed for the third straight game, and it wasn’t even Penn-Princeton weekend. The fact that the game was being televised by DirecTV might have had something to do with it; then again, the stands were full for Yale the next night as well.

Despite a second-half meltdown against the Elis where Harvard’s 16-point halftime lead quickly evaporated, the Crimson gave the fans plenty to cheer about. Firstly, except for the second half Saturday night the team was making its shots. Dating back to the Penn game in early January, Harvard was shooting over 50 percent. Timely buckets, and junior guard Pat Harvey’s propensity for finishing off drives in spectacular, Allen Iverson-like manner got the fans on their feet every time.

Big defensive plays incited the crowd as well. The league’s leading scorer, Brown’s Earl Hunt, was jeered by the student fans all night, and it looked like it got to him: he only made one shot and had six points the entire game. A bone-headed play late in the game embarrassed him even more, when Harvard captain Drew Gellert, who covered Hunt most of the evening, simply ripped the ball out of his hands for a steal.

“I think he was going to make a move,” Gellert said. “He just put the ball out in front of him and I grabbed it.”

That’s Gellert being diplomatic. From the sideline, it looked like Hunt was so spaced out he didn’t even realize there was someone there guarding him.

The excitement of Friday’s win over one of the best teams in the conference carried over to Saturday night’s game, and for the first half it looked like the Crimson was unstoppable. A balanced scoring attack by Harvard and the early elimination of Yale’s three-point shooting abilities allowed the home team to go in to the locker room up 38-22.

But then the 20-day layoff between games due to exam period manifested itself in the worst way possible.

Yale’s head coach, James Jones, pulled out a zone defense similar to the one Harvard had used earlier and put the ball in the hands of his two freshmen guards, Edwin Draughan and Alex Gamboa. The zone befuddled a Crimson offense that tried to dribble into it or shoot over it, to no avail.

Harvard shot 30.8 percent in the second half and got stuck with its second straight home loss to Yale.

“Coach had every right to go off on us,” said Harvey, talking about the post-game meeting in the locker room. “We want to bounce back, not let a loss like this ruin our whole season. We can’t get down on ourselves now.”