Co-captain Jonathan Chu remembers the feeling, if only barely.

But he is the only one, the only player on the No. 39 Harvard men’s tennis team who had experienced, on court, the sting of an Ivy League loss before Saturday’s 5-2 defeat at the hands of Columbia. The disappointment followed Friday’s 5-2 victory over Cornell.

The last time the Crimson (9-10, 1-1 Ivy) lost in league play? April 21, 2002—a 4-3 loss to Brown. Chu, the only freshman in the lineup that day, played his team’s top singles and doubles matches.

But Chu knows, after watching his squad go 20-1 in the Ivies his first three years, that “for all the other Ivy teams playing us, it could make their seasons if they beat Harvard.”

And the Crimson was certainly vulnerable after an 0-for-4 spring break trip through California.

With its doubles combinations not yet fixed and its best singles players nagged by injury—Chu with a torn abdominal muscle and senior Martin Wetzel with a shoulder injury—Harvard struggled at the Beren Tennis Center, dropping the doubles point both days and overcoming this initial deficit just once.

COLUMBIA 5, HARVARD 2

Though the duo of Chu and freshman Dan Nguyen was first to fall to the No. 72 Lions (13-2, 3-0), dropping the top doubles match by an 8-2 count, the next two doubles contests were tight, give-and-take affairs.

Freshman Ashwin Kumar and sophomore Shantanu Dhaka took a 4-1 lead in the middle match, only to see the score knotted at five apiece. Meanwhile, on the third court, junior Brandon Chiu and co-captain Jason Beren surmounted a 5-2 deficit to bring their contest to six apiece.

Win both matches, and Harvard would take the doubles point and an early, 1-0 lead—lose but one of the contests, though, and Columbia would grab the edge.

And when Kumar ripped a cross-court shot wide to end his match at 8-6, it was the Lions who jumped out in front.

“Being down 1-0 is very different,” said Chu, adding, “we’re used to just rolling guys in doubles.”

All three doubles pairings had been switched from the previous day, and, said Chiu, “I guess we’re struggling just finding good combinations. We tried all three new combinations, and the energy just wasn’t there.”

Sophomore Gideon Valkin leveled the match with a quick 6-1, 6-4 victory in the sixth singles slot, and Chu gave the Crimson the lead with his 6-4, 7-6 win—but Chiu dropped a heated three-set contest, and Dhaka would soon follow suit.

And so, with the Lions in possession of a 3-2 edge, all attention fell on Courts 2 and 3, on which a pair of Harvard rookies were playing just their second-ever Ivy matches.