Like the Harvard team, Cserny will enter tomorrow’s game with a little more clout than usual. That’s because she is the 2005 Ivy League Player of the Year, as voted by the coaches and announced yesterday.

Averaging 21.2 points per game, good for sixth in the nation, she also received First Team All-Ivy honors for the fourth straight season—joining Allison Feaster ’98 and Hana Peljto ’04 as the only Crimson players to have done so.

Harvard junior point guard Jessica Holsey, who led the Ivy League in assists in 2004-05 at 4.8 per game, was selected to the Ivies’ Second Team.

Sharing honors with the two Crimson stars are four Dartmouth players—center Elise Morrison, a first-teamer, guard Angie Soriaga and forward Ashley Taylor, both second-teamers, and honorable mention guard Jeannie Cullen, who pumped two near-impossible threes in the waning minutes of Tuesday’s game.

“Cullen is just an unstoppable shooter,” Murphy said.

Taylor and Morrison combined on 10 turnovers on Tuesday after being hassled by Crimson defenders on the perimeter and in the paint. A superb Harvard defensive effort registered 11 steals and countless deflections out of bounds.

“I think they’ll tell their guards to cut out harder and make tighter passes,” Murphy said. “We were talking about watching film, but we know their personnel. We know their game.”

Thus are the advantages of playing a team back-to-back. But there’s no getting around the fact that the Crimson must manage twice as many Ivy defeats in one week—two—as Dartmouth suffered all year.

There’s a silver lining, of course. And its name is Providence’s Pizzitola Sports Center, where the Big Green fell to hometown Brown on February 25.

“We love the Brown gym,” Cserny said, “because we have won there and they haven’t.”

“We’re undefeated,” Murphy added.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.