Gradually, he recovered enough to finally take the field that year—a process which inauspiciously began with an opening-week ankle sprain—and Klimkiewicz settled into his starting role at third base.

By year’s end, he flourished.

Despite a swollen knee, and despite not playing at all for essentially a calendar year, Klimkiewicz hit .317, led the Crimson in RBI (33), and was top-three in home runs (7) and slugging percentage (.558). He solidified a slot in the heart of the order—where he will hit again in 2005—and flashed glimpses of the person Walsh wanted and the player BB&N coach Rick Forestiere dubbed “the best high school hitter I’ve ever seen.”

Klimkiewicz won Honorable Mention All-Ivy and, even more memorably, a few titanic at-bats.

Although the team later fell short in its Ivy title defense to Princeton, Klimkiewicz worked 35 of 43 games, at times carrying the offensive burden by himself when Trey Hendricks ’04 succumbed to knee surgery down the stretch.

Teammates all reference the Yale series, in which he went 7-for-11 with six RBI in three games, clobbering a grand slam off Bulldogs ace Josh Sowers to lift himself and Harvard out of a slump and atop the Red Rolfe division. And then, of course, there was the Ivy championship series against the Tigers, where—facing elimination—he drove in every Crimson run against flamethrower and eventual fourth-round draft pick Ross Ohlendorf, topping it off with a 400-foot home run into the trees in dead center.

“I just got my hands in,” Klimkiewicz says, pressured to describe the at-bat. He grins. “The best hits, it doesn’t even feel like you swung hard.”

THE NATURE OF GOD

Today, nearly three years divorced from its last Ivy championship, it is that power supply which Harvard will be looking to tap into once again.

Unfortunately for Klimkiewicz—a third-year player, let’s remember—the regrettable sequel to that freshman season makes things a tad more complicated than that.

In 2004, the then-sophomore was plagued by the injury bug again, pulling his right hamstring before the season started and then his left in just the second series of the year. He would proceed to re-pull the hamstring in that tortured left leg three more times while attempting a comeback, dooming himself to occasional pinch-hitting opportunities and few starts.

But for these injuries, noticeably, there aren’t accounts of impact fractures, sprained ankles, or “freak divots.”

Calmly and confidently, Klimkiewicz simply takes responsibility upon himself.

“I had a pretty good freshman year,” he says, “and then I went and played summer ball in Concord. My body was taking a pounding. I wasn’t in good shape, and sophomore year, it all caught up to me. It was just a bad season.”

Klimkiewicz’s hamstring problems, his doctors told him, were linked to residual muscle imbalances in his knees. He had rushed his recovery schedule by a month, and the patella tendon used to replace his ACL had not yet loosened up or strengthened enough to function as an effective proxy. His quadriceps and hamstrings began “pulling apart” on each other in turn.