They had waited eight years for all of this. For the winner’s dock, for an elusive Eastern Sprints title, for the thrill of crossing the line ahead of everybody else.

They had waited, had come in second and third and everything else but first.

And yesterday, after the finish line came and went and three crews lay paralyzed at the finish line, exhausted after 2,000 cutthroat meters of bow ball-to-bow ball rowing, they waited again.

The Harvard varsity lightweights waited for the verdict. Harvard, Yale, and Cornell were a blur of red and blue across the line, eight men right across from one another, battling for an inch of space in a race that left no room to spare. There was no arm-pumping and no celebratory shouts from any of the three boats—nobody knew who had won.

“Any race that comes down to the last ten strokes, you’re going to wonder who won,” varsity two-seat Wes Kauble said. “And it came down to the last ten strokes.”

But with officials crowded in front of television monitors, squinting to determine which bow ball had out-dueled the other two, the cameras and the bow balls had decided that eight years was long enough.

Harvard had waited for eight years, and the varsity lightweights took that bow ball and ran with it. The Crimson’s 0.2-second win secured the varsity’s first Eastern Sprints title since 1997, a drought that included three national champion crews which never won at Lake Quigsigamond.

“A race like this reverberates throughout the whole program,” Kauble said. “It’s not just our boat, it’s the 1999 boat and the 2001 boat and the 2003 boat and all the even boats, too.”

“A lot of the alums really appreciate it,” sophomore varsity five-seat Marc Luff added. “[An alumnus] came up to me and said, ‘You made a lot of people proud today.’”

The No. 1 Harvard varsity took the inside lane, with Cornell, Yale, and Navy lining up to the right of the Crimson. Yale jumped out of the start with a three-seat advantage over Harvard, Big Red, and the Midshipmen, although all six boats maintained contact with one another in the race’s first 1,000 meters. The Bulldogs widened their margin to a near boat length by 800 meters down. Harvard and Cornell exchanged seats in the attempt to catch Yale, creeping up on the Bulldogs as the boats reached the midway mark.

“Yale went out and they really had a gutsy go,” said senior varsity seven-seat Michael Kummer. “They rowed the piece how they had to row the piece. It was a well-fought race on everybody’s behalf.”

The Crimson, as it has done all season, erased a sizeable deficit off of the start by the 1,200-meter mark. Harvard inched back with a strong move against Cornell and came up even with the Big Red, using the push to gain precious ground on a confident Yale crew. Navy, which entered the race as the country’s No. 2 crew, sat within three or four seats of third-place Cornell.

Coming into the last 500 meters, each of the four boats sat less than 90 seconds away from a Sprints title. Harvard and Yale were dead even, Cornell was a deck behind, and Navy was a dangerous four seats off of the pace.

“Everybody was there,” Kummer said. “One second separating the top four crews is the definition of a close race.”

Little would change over the last 500 meters, once the crews became visible to the throng of screaming spectators. Even with 60 meters remaining—approximately seven strokes left—the Sprints title sat somewhere between the inches separating Harvard and Yale.