Just 400 meters later, the Crimson had walked through the other crews to a one-length lead and showed no signs of fading.

“We wanted to set a really fast tempo as soon as we settled and to push it all the way down the course,” Sagalowsky said.

Maintaining consistently powerful strokes in lieu of short unsustainable bursts of speed, Harvard grabbed an open-water lead over the Golden Bears not long after the 1,100-meter mark, then pulled away for the nearly five-second win.

The Huskies slipped ahead of California to grab second, while Navy, Princeton and Dartmouth rounded out the top six.

While this Crimson crew won’t say it is the best in Harvard history, the mere suggestion touched a cord with several team members.

“It’s neat to think we could possibly stack up against those guys we’ve idolized our whole Harvard careers, the ones whose pictures we have on our walls,” McDaniel said. “It’s nice to think that one day we’ll have our pictures up on that wall, too.”

—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.