After the Harvard women’s basketball team blew away Dartmouth 58-42 to close out its regular season last Tuesday, Big Green Coach Chris Wielgus acklowledged a few obvious facts about the Crimson in defeat.

“I’ve been part of many championship teams, and Harvard played like a championship team,” Wielgus said. “They’re experienced. They have five seniors that have not put a ring on their finger, and they got it this year. That’s what you need to win—experience, depth, and a little bit of luck.”

Harvard was the preseason favorite to win the Ivy title not just because it returned the vast majority of its scoring talent from last year’s second-place team, but also because of the sense of desparation from its seniors. And on that strength, the Crimson lived up to its expectations, winning the league title by a school record-breaking margin in the standings and outdistancing nearest competitors Cornell and Penn by five games with a 13-1 league record.

Harvard exceeded expectations in some area and fell short in others. Crimson posted a solid 9-4 record in nonconference play—a far cry from the 2-10 start from its 2000 season—boosting Harvard to a 22-5 overall record and a school-record 13th seed in the NCAA tournament. But those wins never came easy. They were typically characterized by early deficits and blown leads—but always comebacks.

Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith now calls her 2001-02 team the best in her 20-year coaching history at coming back from deficits and winning close games, and she has reason to be confident if her team’s first-round NCAA matchup against North Carolina comes down to the wire.

Pre-Ivy Play

On Nov. 17, the day the Harvard football team closed out is best season since 1913, the women’s basketball team aimed to begin a run at its best season ever.

In an opening 77-54 victory over Wagner, Harvard unveiled its newest weapon to complement 2001 Ivy Rookie of the Year Hana Peljto—a lanky 6’3 center named Reka Cserny who could do more than rebound and hit one-foot jump shots; she could drive inside, hit the three, and play great defense. Cserny scored 19 and grabbed eight boards in her Harvard debut, making her year-long sabbatical prior to this season with the Hungarian junior national team well worth the wait.

For all the offense Cserny could provide, it would all go for naught if Harvard couldn’t play defense, and the Crimson suffered its defensive low of the season with a 93-77 defeat to BU in which it gave up six threes to one player.

Harvard had nowhere to go but up after that.

“The BU loss was a really tough loss for us and that was the kind of loss that we felt [in a 1-10 start] last year,” said sophomore Tricia Tubridy. “It was a wake-up call because no one wanted to feel that way again.”

Harvard improved its defense following the BU loss with a 68-62 win over Fairfield and a 59-51 loss to eventual Big East semifinalist Villanova. As senior Jenn Monti had warned, teams had started to find ways to stop Cserny, and the freshman was limited to four points for the weekend.

But Cserny came through the next with two double-doubles in a second-place finish at the Kansas State’s tournament. In the semifinals, Harvard won in spite of Peljto’s absence due to an ankle sprain in a 12-point win over Idaho St., thanks largely to one of Tubridy’s many team-best rebounding efforts. Peljto’s return the next day wasn’t enough to lift Harvard over the Wildcats in the tourney’s final.

The remainder of Harvard’s pre-Ivy campaign was marked by comebacks. The Crimson won despite halftime deficits against Central Connecticut, Rhode Island, Northeastern and Manhattan. Every single Harvard opponent was surprised by the turnarounds, which were often the result of Peljto or Cserny sitting before the break with foul trouble. By the time of the Manhattan victory, the comebacks had become routine.

The end of the Crimson’s nonconference season, which included a 67-44 blowout of eventual Patriot League Bucknell and a 78-66 loss to Syracuse, had several individual highlights—the emergence of sophomore Dirkje Dunham as a starter in place of an injured Katie Gates, the re-emergence of senior guard Jenn Monti as a three-point threat, and Cserny’s freshman-record 33-point effort against Manhattan.