Here at the Crimson, we put out hundreds of sports stories every year, and sometimes as Harvard’s 41 varsity intercollegiate sports pile on top of each other, we lose the simple abilities of perception and hindsight.

But I was at the Beren Tennis Center this past weekend, watching the Harvard men’s tennis team roll over its first-round opponent in the NCAA tournament, when something struck me: this is the team’s best showing in my three years here. So I went home, clicked on the Internet archives of this paper and found something even more bedeviling—there have been a lot of times in this past school year when we’ve written that a Harvard sports team had its best season in “x” number of years.

In fact, 2001-2002 will go down as one of the most successful and memorable Harvard sports years ever, and it’s not even over yet, thanks to baseball, tennis, track and others. But as this is my last column of the year, let’s take a trip down memory lane (a.k.a JFK St.) to the athletic accomplishments of the year past.

Like almost everything else in America, our trip must begin on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as thousands of Harvard undergrads made their way to house JCRs to register for the upcoming year. The terrorist attacks were on a Tuesday, and all Harvard sporting events for the next week were either canceled or postponed, including football’s season opener against Holy Cross. The decision to take these steps were made by a fresh Harvard face, new Director of Athletics Robert Scalise. The renaissance of Harvard sports had begun.

Over the next two months our athletes competed in outdoor sports with reckless abandon and amazing success. In October, the women’s tennis team captured the fall ECAC championship, while the football team scored a pair of heart attack-inducing wins over Princeton and Dartmouth over at the Stadium. By November, Harvard was winning trophies left and right. Men’s water polo had its highest finish ever (third) at the Eastern Championships, field hockey close out its season with four straight wins and both soccers were headed for the NCAA tournament.

Men’s soccer, led by a youth movement with veteran leadership (always a strong combination), made its first NCAA appearance in five years on the strength of eight shutouts during the regular season. Considering the team had finished last in the Ivy League the year before, the 1-0 loss to Rutgers in the first round was nothing to be ashamed of. The women booters got a little farther, thanks to a quadruple-overtime goal by junior Beth Totman to beat Hartford in the first round, before losing to perennial national power UConn in the next.

And of course, there was football. Injuries to the starting quarterback and running backs were no problem; it just bucked up on defense and line protection. Junior wide receiver Carl Morris, the Ivy Player of the Year, caught everything that was thrown at him, and even threw a few passes himself. Pure heart pushed the Crimson over the edge against defending champ Penn, and then Harvard’s decisive 35-23 victory at the Yale Bowl gave the Crimson its first perfect season since 1913. Essentially, the best season of the modern era.

The weather turned nasty in the winter, but Harvard just pushed its winning ways indoors. Men’s basketball hung in the most competitive Ivy race in recent memory for much longer than anyone had expected, only a year after losing its top scorer. And none of the Lavietes Pavilion fans will soon forget the two-point loss to Princeton, the overtime upset of Penn or the nationally televised demolition of Brown.