While the Harvard softball team may not have ended its season with the title it hoped for, the ups and downs of the 2009 campaign have not only given the team many memorable moments, but, more importantly, have revealed the foundations of a strong team for next season.

After a pair of preseason tournament wins at the Miken Classic and the Highlander Classic, the Crimson suffered a string of losses to Ivy League opponents. But a late-season turnaround gave Harvard the opportunity to win it all.

With a trip to the Ivy League Championship Series on the line, the Crimson ultimately dropped both games of its final doubleheader against Dartmouth to relinquish the Ivy North Division title.

“Obviously, we would have wanted to go further than we did,” co-captain Bailey Vertovez said. “But that being said, it was great to be in it until the last game.”

Harvard opened the season with a win for the first time in five years, and followed up tournament play in Kansas with tournament victories in Boca Raton and Radford. In the last contest, the Crimson edged out the Highlanders, who were recently ousted in the first round of the 2009 NCAA tournament, 3-2, to nab the title.

But Harvard couldn’t maintain its preseason momentum, as the team split with perennial basement-dweller Columbia in its Ivy opener.

Though the Crimson bounced back with back-to-back doubleheader wins against Penn and Rhode Island the next week, the team struggled to maintain consistency as the regular season wore on.

“In general, it’s great to see that we were able to beat every team in the league at least once,” Vertovez said. “This was the year of splits. It was clear that we could have taken both games from teams, but we weren’t able to put that together.”

After losing the first game of the twinbill to eventual Ivy League champion Cornell, 3-0, in its Ancient Eight home opener, Harvard stormed back to edge the Big Red, 6-5, in the nightcap to snap Cornell’s 15-game winning streak. Harvard then split a pair with defending league champion Princeton the next day.

The Crimson faltered in its Ivy North opener, getting swept by Yale, but responded by sweeping the Bulldogs two days later and picking up three crucial division wins against Brown.

“It’s been said that we always kind of come through at the end, so I think this team does show a lot of heart,” freshman pitcher Rachel Brown said. “I think we knew it was going to come down to the last weekend all along.”

And in the end, it came down to a home-and-home series with Dartmouth on the final weekend of league play. Win three out of four and Harvard would win the Ivy North Division title and advance to the ILCS. Any less, and the season would effectively end.

“On Saturday, we knew we had to take at least one of those games so we could win at least one of them at home [on Sunday],” Brown said. “We played our hearts out on Saturday, and we were behind in both games. Coming from behind on Saturday in both games was really exciting.”

Harvard staged sixth-inning comebacks in both contests to sweep the afternoon, 7-3 and 6-3.

But the bats ran out of steam on Sunday, as the Big Green got the better of the Crimson in two low-scoring games.

“It was a very emotional day on Sunday—last home games, Senior Day,” Vertovez said. “After we lost that first game, it was kind of a shocker. We didn’t expect to lose that first one and in the second we put too much pressure on ourselves and that’s when things fell apart. It’s not like we gave it to them on Sunday, they played better than us so they took it.”

Despite the disappointing end to the season, Harvard can look forward to a strong returning squad in 2010. Graduating only two seniors and with six returning juniors–not to mention freshman pitching sensation Brown and first-year offensive powerhouse Whitney Shaw–the Crimson will look to be better than ever next year.

—Staff writer Lucy D. Chen can be reached at lucychen@fas.harvard.edu.