“We got a lot of open shots,” co-captain Oliver McNally said. “I don’t think that we were jacking or anything like that. It didn’t have that feel to it.”

Fordham coach Tom Pecora felt the Rams caught a break with the Crimson’s off shooting night.

“[Laurent] Rivard’s just a tremendous shooter,” said Pecora of the Harvard sophomore, who went 1-of-8 from deep. “We got lucky the way he shot tonight.”

But Amaker noted that it was more than luck that accounted for the Crimson’s shooting woes.

“Certainly [Fordham] had a lot to do with it—how active they were defensively and how aggressive they were closing out on our shooters,” he said. “I’d like to think that we will shoot better at some point as we’ve done in the past, but give them credit.”

OUT OF LUCK

Before Thursday night’s matchup, the Crimson had taken care of business when it was supposed to, winning all of the games it was favored in and dropping just one contest to then-No. 9 UConn. Even so, it seemed as though Harvard’s luck was starting to run out.

Taking on a mediocre Florida Atlantic squad on Dec. 22, the Crimson trailed the Owls by two with 10:03 to play before eventually winning by 12. Playing a Boston College team picked to finish dead last in the ACC on Dec. 29, Harvard fell behind by 11, 14-3, less than six minutes in before storming back to win by 21. And then against a talented Saint Joseph’s squad on Dec. 31, Harvard came back from an 11-point second-half deficit to capture a five-point win.

“We were concerned coming in,” Amaker said. “We talked about how getting off to a better start would hopefully allow us to get in a flow. It didn’t necessarily go that way for us here tonight.

McNally echoed his coach’s sentiments.

“We got lucky in a couple games,” he said. “We can’t be living like that. We used to be a team that got a lot of quick starts, and we haven’t been doing that. We’ve got to get back to finding whatever that was.”