Harvey’s words ring especially important considering what happened last year, when the Crimson let a close loss at home to Princeton on a Saturday night turn into a five-game losing streak that killed any Ivy title hopes. Just like last year, Harvard now heads into a four-game road jaunt, where the basketball gods have been cruel in the past.

There’s little reason to think the season is in dire straits, but the killer of the Ivy League schedule is that it makes Saturday losses feel like you lost the entire weekend. And with no post-season conference tournament, each home loss adds drama to the race for No. 1.

But the truth is Harvard walks away with a 4-2 Ivy record, good for third in the league. And for only the first time this season (and hopefully the last), the team did not bounce back from the adversity of a close game.

More importantly, so far this season, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, Brown and Yale have learned an important lesson: that Lavietes Pavilion is going to be as hard a place to win a game as Penn’s Palestra or Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium.

Harvard Coach Frank Sullivan gets the final words here, spoken after the Brown victory but just as appropriate after Saturday:

“We’ve come off three games in a row now, and for people to say that school spirit doesn’t exist—well I think we’ve shown tremendous school spirit. The student fans have been terrific, the cheerleaders, the dance team, the band—I think everybody has been great about this whole thing. It’s truly invigorated the players.”

Need more proof? Just ask “Slammin’ Sammy” Winter and the 2,000 fans who witnessed “The Dunk.”