“It kind of pissed us off that they were trying to throw alley-oops down 15 in our gym,” Stehle said.

Yale made a desperation run late in the game to cut the lead to nine, but Stehle hit two free throws to give the Crimson a double-digit lead for good.

Looking for the exclamation point up 13 with less than 10 seconds to go, Stehle heaved the ball down the court to captain Jason Norman. Norman charged toward the hoop and broke into the signature stride that almost always precedes a two-handed jam. The Harvard captain went up, but got fouled hard by Yale guard Alex Gamboa.

While Norman couldn’t complete the dunk, he mustered enough strength to get the ball up on the rim, and after a few bounces, it fell in.

The layup provided Harvard’s 39th and 40th points in the paint on the contest and put an emphatic ending on a game that the Crimson dominated from start to finish.

“[We] really wanted to finish the game with a little distance, if we could,” Sullivan said of the late Norman dunk attempt. “I don’t think it had anything to do anything that Yale did. We were just really geared to finish the game in workman-like fashion.”

The win vaulted Harvard past Yale in the Ivy League standings for the first time since the two teams met two weeks earlier in New Haven, when the Crimson couldn’t convert on any of its three possessions in the final minute in a one-point defeat.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu.