At that point, league play began in full. Despite a loss to Yale at the front end of a back-to-back game weekend, the Crimson won four out of its next five Ivy matchups.

As a product of increasingly efficient shooting from the free-throw line as well as an upsurge in points from Berry, Clark, and Lippert, with Lippert scoring her 1000th point in a matchup versus Penn, Harvard was able to take these victories handily, winning by no less than eight points during the 12-day period.

Rutzen attributed her team’s success at that point in the season to the close-knit nature of the group.

“We’re a family, and when you’re a family you don’t want family vacation to end,” Rutzen says. “So we just wanted to keep playing, winning, and having fun as long as possible. It worked out.”

A 28-point blowout loss to Princeton, though, quickly stopped the streak. The skidding lasted into the next weekend, as the Crimson could not make up a 14-point deficit late in the second period and fell to a Brown team that it had defeated only three weeks prior.

In its next few matchups, Harvard, had success against its Ivy foes with, once again, the exception of Princeton. The Crimson took down the Quakers, Columbia, Cornell, and Dartmouth in an orderly fashion, needing those wins in order to clinch its bid to the WNIT tournament.

And clinch it did, paving the path to its record-breaking defeat over Hofstra and near upset of Temple.

—Staff writer Juliet Spies-Gans can be reached at jspiesgans@college.harvard.edu.