All that Harvard men’s basketball coach Frank Sullivan wanted this summer when he made Division III Roanoke a last-minute addition to his team’s schedule was an extra nonconference game before the exam period.

He got all he could handle.

Roanoke had not faced a Division I opponent in seven seasons, but it hardly showed at Lavietes Pavillion Wednesday night. The Maroons nearly engineered what would have been an impressive upset before bowing to the Crimson, 93-88.

“As a D-III school, our expectations of them might’ve been a little low,” said Harvard senior forward Sam Winter. “But that was unjustified, obviously. They proved us wrong.”

The game was the first-ever meeting between the two schools. It was arranged when Harvard elected to sacrifice its annual exhibition game this season in favor of another regular-season game.

For a good portion of the game, that looked like a bad decision from Harvard’s standpoint.

The Maroons (4-6) utilized its team speed in a superb transition game, giving the Crimson (9-5) fits and propelling them to a 56-54 lead early in the second half. While Harvard eventually regained control, it wasn’t able to put the Maroons away until the final seconds.

“All the credit belongs to Roanoke,” Sullivan said. “They came in with great poise. They were fearless. And the thing that Roanoke did was really dictate the tempo they wanted. I really didn’t think the game could get up to the 90s, to be honest with you.

“But they came in and said, ‘We want to outscore you.’”

And they almost did.

“We came here to win,” said Roanoke coach Page Moir. “We’ve got a good program. I think we matched up well with them. We had to play at our best to win, but we missed too many foul shots and made too many turnovers to do that.”

Roanoke trailed by just four points midway through the second half, and despite a Harvard run that gave the Crimson an 11-point lead several minutes later, the Maroons whittled it back down to four with 12 seconds to go.

But Roanoke was unable to force a turnover on the ensuing inbounds play, and Josh Foster—who had a game-high 22 points for the Maroons—had to foul Winter. He hit one of two free throws for the final margin of victory.

“It was tough going into this game, because we didn’t know a lot about them,” said Winter, who scored 20 points and added a career-high 17 rebounds to run his Ivy League-leading average to 9.0 rpg. “But we knew they liked to run, and that they were capable of putting up big numbers like that.”

That became evident when the Maroons outscored Harvard 17-5 in the last 5:21 of the first half to cut Harvard’s lead from 15 points to just three, 46-43.