“It was a sensational effort by both teams and our team in particular to clamp down, get the stops, [and] make the plays necessary,” Amaker said.

In the opening frame, junior co-captain Laurent Rivard lit it up from behind the arc, knocking down all four of his three-point attempts, including his team’s final bucket of the half off an assist from sophomore Wesley Saunders. But though Rivard tried twice more from deep in the second frame, his 12 first-half points were all the junior would tally over the course of the game.

The story was the same for the rest of the Harvard team, as Dartmouth limited long-range offensive chances in the second half. After shooting an impressive six of seven from three-point range in the first, the Crimson made just one more shot from deep on six attempts in the final 20 minutes of play, dropping from 85.7 to just 16.7 percent shooting from deep.

Although Harvard struggled on the defensive glass in the first half—Dartmouth tallied nine offensive rebounds and 17 second-chance points in the frame—the Crimson buckled down on defense down the stretch.

“We gave them way too many second shots in the first half,” Chambers said. “[Amaker] was really adamant about making us box out.”

The Big Green added just four more points off of offensive boards after halftime—the same total as Harvard in the frame.

“If you look at the shooting percentages from the first half and the second half, I thought we did a tremendous job with our defense,” Amaker said. “That was one of the bigger keys for us to come out with a win.”

The Crimson pulled down 16 rebounds to Dartmouth’s 11 in the second half after a first half in which the Big Green outrebounded Harvard, 17-9.

“We just toughed it out as a unit,” Chambers said. “There was more talk on the defensive end. We were really focused every possession on trying to get a stop and trying to get a rebound.”

—Staff writer Catherine E. Coppinger can be reached at ccoppinger@college.harvard.edu.