After an historic 12-2 run through the non-conference schedule, co-captain Keith Wright and the No. 21 Crimson open the Ivy season Saturday afternoon against Dartmouth.

Ready or not, the real season begins now.

The 14-game tournament that is the Ivy League regular season tips off on Saturday, with the No. 21 Harvard men’s basketball team (12-2) taking on Dartmouth (3-12) at Lavietes Pavilion at 2:00 p.m.

After surging through most of its non-conference schedule, the Crimson hit its first real bump in the road when it lost at Fordham on Tuesday night, the only blemish on its schedule thus far other than a respectable loss at No. 8 UConn.

Though the defeat to the Rams exposed a number of Harvard’s weaknesses, the Crimson cannot afford many slip-ups against any of its Ancient Eight opponents.

With no postseason tournament in the Ivy League, the conference’s representative in the Big Dance is determined by the team with the best regular season league record. That means each contest is as important as any other, and every game—as Harvard learned after losing at Yale by a point last season—can have major postseason implications.

“You can’t get any game back in the Ivy League,” co-captain Oliver McNally said. “We know that. I’ve got to do a better job getting the point across to all the younger guys.”

This year, the road to March Madness should be even tougher for the Crimson, which learned Tuesday night that with its Top-25 ranking and all the national media attention also comes a major target on its back. Playing on the road is always difficult in college basketball, but it should be even more so this year for Harvard, which will be traveling to its rivals’ gyms as a favorite that the home fans will be hungry to see upset.

And in conference play, there are no guarantees, as then-No. 22 Cornell learned in 2010, when it lost by 15 at Penn—which to that point was 3-16—in front of a rowdy crowd at the Palestra.

But the Crimson gets to start things off at the comforts of home, where it holds the nation’s ninth-longest home winning streak at a program-record 21 games, against one of the worst statistical teams in the country.

The Big Green has an R.P.I. of 341—fifth poorest in the nation out of 345 Division I programs—and the squad’s 58.6 points per game average ranks 327th. Dartmouth’s only wins this season have come against Elon, a 1-13 Bryant squad, and Division III Alaska-Anchorage.

That being said, the Crimson is not taking anyone lightly. Last year, the Big Green—which finished 5-23 overall and 1-13 in the conference—gave Harvard a major scare at Lavietes, holding a 12-point second-half lead before the Crimson rallied to pull ahead and eventually win by nine.

In this season’s contest, McNally emphasized the necessity of starting quickly, something that Harvard has not been able to doing of late.

“We got lucky in a couple games,” the guard said. “We came back against BC and pulled it out against St. Joe’s after being down behind early. We can’t keep 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 doing whatever that was.”

Big Green guard R.J. Griffin had 20 points in last year’s near-upset, and this season the junior enters as his squad’s leading scorer at 9.9 points per game. Freshman forward Gabas Maldunas has contributed 9.1 points and 6.8 rebounds, while talented senior guard Jabari Trotter averages 8.1 points. Wings David Rufful, Jvonte Brooks, and John Golden also average over six points per contest.

That type of multifaceted offensive attack is what Harvard head coach Tommy Amaker believes is the strength of his squad, and something the Crimson needs to return to.

“We have to have balance,” Amaker said. “When we’re not shooting the ball well from the perimeter, it’s not going to help [co-captain] Keith Wright on the inside. ... [But] if someone is not having an opportunity, that’s not the worst thing in the world for us because others are going to have opportunities and those are the things we’re going to cash in on.”

Though the Fordham loss might have been seen as representing a wake-up call for a team with aspirations greater than simply winning the Ancient Eight, Amaker said he hoped his team was beyond the need for such losses.

“[That game was] not indicative of who we are,” Amaker said. “We’ve played a tremendous non-conference schedule and we were fairly successful throughout. [Dartmouth] is up next, and hopefully we can be prepared for them.”

—Staff writer Scott A. Sherman be reached at ssherman13@college.harvard.edu.