To those in the sportswriting community, Elliott Prasse-Freeman is notorious for snapping off colorful quotes, flashing his trademark grin while speaking his mind more frankly than Harvard coach Frank Sullivan might sometimes care to hear.

But after Saturday’s gut-wrenching, last-second, 67-66 loss to Princeton—the third such loss for the Crimson in as many years—the senior point guard was anything but his usual self.

With a pained and somber stare across the court of an eerily silent Lavietes Pavilion, Prasse-Freeman did his best to graciously get through reporters’ questions.

“I should have shot the ball when I caught it,” Prasse-Freeman said quietly, expressing sincere regret over the game’s final play. “It’s a play that I’ve already run over in my mind a couple of times, and I probably will a couple more from here on out.”

When Prasse-Freeman’s shot cruelly caromed off the backboard, the Tigers again escaped Cambridge victorious, leaving the Crimson’s Class of 2003 winless against the Tigers in their careers.

“I guess we never quite got over the hump with those guys,” Prasse-Freeman intoned matter-of-factly, summing up four years of frustration in one understated sentence.

“We’re devastated,” Prasse-Freeman responded when asked of the mood among the team’s four seniors, who have only four games left in their collegiate careers.

After a pause, Prasse-Freeman continued, mentioning the legacy he and his classmates feared they were leaving to young teammates and the program as a whole.

“I don’t want them to remember us as the guys that couldn’t win the big game,” Prasse-Freeman lamented. “We need to instill the winning tradition in the younger players.”

Harvard is in danger of posting only its second losing season in seven years and potentially its worst Ivy mark since the 1994-95 campaign. Though the program is in its longest stretch of sustained success, Prasse-Freeman’s comments suggest that he and his classmates feel like they are letting down the next generation with nights like Saturday.

But Saturday’s heartrending loss to Princeton was far from an aberrant stain on Harvard’s program. It is exactly what the program has come to embody.

In two weeks, yet another Crimson class will leave a legacy of hope and heartbreak. Like a certain local professional franchise, the Harvard men’s basketball team can always captivate the imagination and thrill the crowd, but ultimately, the magic runs out and the disappointment sets in.

Harvard has certainly won a handful of “big games” in the past few years. Splitting the season series with Penn both last year and the season before is clearly an impressive feat and the 1999 overtime win against the Tigers probably ranks among the program’s greatest victories. But those have been the exception and not the rule.

Those rare moments of serendipitous celebration can often make one forget the far more frequent moments of disappointment. The only Ivy team never to win a league title, the Crimson squandered a golden chance in last season’s jumbled race when it lost a close game at home to Princeton and then slipped up on the road against Yale and Cornell.

The year before, an exuberant and hopeful Crimson squad downed the mighty Quakers at home thanks to the heroics of Dan Clemente ’01, only to suffer a devastating five-game losing streak that was initiated by probably the most heartbreaking moment of them all—Kyle Wente’s desperation buzzer-beater that launched the Tigers to another Ivy crown.