HANOVER, N.H.—It was a year to confound expectations; up at times and down at others, the Harvard baseball team always found a way to surprise.

Fittingly, the Crimson went into this weekend’s Ivy League season-ending series against Dartmouth (25-14, 15-5 Ivy) shouldering a monster task—take at least three of four from the Big Green, the Red Rolfe leader and one of Division I’s best-hitting teams, or go home for the season—and their bats caught fire, only to go silent in the end.

Dartmouth freshman starter Stephen Perry held the Crimson to two runs on five hits on Sunday, pitching all nine innings and winning the 7-2 Red Rolfe division clincher in the Ivy League season’s final game. That was the inappropriate ending to a weekend of offensive heroics in Harvard’s final push for a third-straight division title.

First, Harvard (20-17-1, 12-7 Ivy) split Saturday’s series at home, winning the first game 20-9 but dropping the second, 13-10, after a devastating ninth-inning collapse.

Needing to sweep the Big Green out of Hanover yesterday, the Crimson got sweet redemption in a dominating shutout and 5-0 win from star pitcher Trey Hendricks—the victim of the previous day’s ninth-inning outburst—in the first game, only to be shut down by Perry and lose the second.

The weekend left a bitter taste for players and coaches, who had similarly come down to the wire and won against Dartmouth in the season’s final series in 2002 and 2003. But with a host of positives—including sophomore Zak Farkes’ assault on the Harvard record books—to be found in an otherwise painful weekend, it was not the way Harvard played that ultimately shattered the Crimson’s title dreams.

Harvard head coach Joe Walsh said it

best. “We played hard today,” Walsh said after Saturday’s disappointing finish. “I don’t think there’s anything that you’ve got to look back and say, ‘We wish we did this,’ or ‘We wish we did that.’ You take everything out of the bag and leave it on the field.”

Instead, Walsh gave credit to Dartmouth, which is celebrating its first Red Rolfe division title since 2001. “It’s just a good ballclub out there,” he said.

The Crimson plays two non-conference make-ups at home versus Holy Cross and Northeastern tomorrow and on Wednesday afternoon—the last college games for seniors Hendricks, centerfielder Bryan Hale and pitchers Jason Brown and Mike Morgalis.

DARTMOUTH 7, HARVARD 2

After tattooing a dizzying collection of Dartmouth pitchers all weekend long, Harvard’s bats were finally figured out yesterday in the Ivy season’s final game—by freshman Stephen Perry.

Perry (6-1) pitched a complete game, marred only by a ninth-inning two-run blast by Harvard catcher Schuyler Mann—the junior’s 10th, which extended his homer streak to four straight games—and the Big Green clinched the Red Rolfe title with a 7-2 win.

The Crimson hit Perry hard all day. But balls that cleared the fence in Cambridge on Saturday were falling short on Sunday—in all, Perry recorded outs on fly balls 17 times.

“For the most part I feel like we made pretty good contact,” Hale said. “The box score would say different, obviously.”