One bad day.

Five bad hours.

Fifteen bad innings.

That’s all it took for the advantage of a 7-1 league start to be wiped clean away in an ugly day of baseball in New Haven on Saturday.

Just one bad day.

Because that’s really all it was. There are lots of excuses and reasons and hypotheses as to why Harvard—on a seven-game Ivy win streak—would stumble the way it did at Yale Field.

Sure, the Crimson was without its best hitter, Trey Hendricks, who was suffering from back spasms and could hardly walk before the first pitch of the doubleheader. And yeah, the team’s starting shortstop Morgan Brown was out after pulling a quadricep during Friday’s loss to Boston College.

But even key personnel losses don’t account for seven errors in two games.

It was just one bad day.

And Yale—which had dropped seven of its last eight games to Harvard—was coming off a 3-1 weekend that included a victory over Tigers’ ace Ross Ohlendorf. They had momentum and confidence and were ready to finally make waves in the Ivy League.

“Hitting has been [Harvard’s] motor all season,” pitcher Mike Mongiardini told the Yale Daily News leading up to the game. “But I think we’ve got the pitching to stop them.”

And Saturday, it looked like he may have been right. Yale’s starters were stellar and Harvard mustered only three runs on 10 hits in both games combined.

But he wasn’t right.

It was just one bad day.

And for most college baseball teams, one bad day isn’t all that bad. You come out flat, hit some deep flies into a strong wind, slide into a collective slump and lose to a team you have no business losing to.