­It’s not The Game but it’s certainly The Rematch.

When Yale visits Harvard this Friday at Lavietes, it brings more than SportsCenter and sweater vests in tow. The game between the league’s two co-leaders is not only the de facto Ivy League championship game, but a chance for Yale to end Harvard’s hegemony atop the Ancient Eight.

In fact, it’s the most important game in modern Yale basketball history.

Hold with me, dear reader. Yes, Yale has played for national championships before—winning in 1901 and 1903. Yes, it did compete in the first five-on-five game of college basketball history—moving away from the seven- and nine-man lineups of the 1890s.

It has won four Ivy League championships, but just one since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 40 teams and Magic beat Bird in the 1979 final—the widely-accepted beginning of the modern era of college basketball. Its 2002 championship was split three ways, with Yale winning the first playoff game and losing the second. Since the Elis last won a title outright, four alumni have called the White House home.

To properly quantify the team’s struggles, this week I collected the point margins—both in conference and overall—for each Ivy League team going back to the 1979-1980 season. Over that stretch, Yale has been the epitome of good but not great. In fact, from 1980 to 2014, Yale had the best combined point margin (at roughly -0.9 points a game) of any team not named Penn or Princeton. It has won 242 conference games in that span, 10 more than fourth-place Harvard but nearly 100 behind second-place Princeton.

Since current coach James Jones arrived in 1999, the numbers look a bit better. Including this year's number, Yale has 128 conference wins in that span, six more than fourth-place (and next-best) Harvard. Along with Harvard, Penn, and Princeton, it is the only team to post a positive-point margin. By comparison, Dartmouth, the Ivy League’s punching bag, has lost games by an average of eight points over the same time.

Given what Jones inherited—a 4-22 team whose -10.6 points per game conference margin was the 15th worst (fifth percentile) in my sample—his rebuilding job hasn’t been given enough credit. Yale has finished in the league’s top half in every season since 2008, something only Princeton can also say.

His work has been overshadowed, however, by the man coaching Yale’s bitter rival. This is why 2002 isn’t the same as 2015—why any Yale basketball game in the last 40 years doesn’t compare to now. When Yale struggled in the 80s, it was losing to the likes of Princeton and Penn. Now it’s sitting at home watching Harvard every March, and nothing else compares.

While Jones has yet to win a championship, Harvard coach Tommy Amaker inherited one of the league’s worst teams in 2007 and quickly put together a juggernaut. While Harvard is going for a fifth straight conference championship, Yale has had its head slammed up against a glass ceiling for the better part of a decade.

If the Bulldogs are going to break through, Friday night is their best chance. In junior forward Justin Sears, Yale has arguably the best interior player and defender in the Ivy League with shooters  like Armani Cotton, Javier Duren, and Jack Montague to keep defenses honest. Freshman Makai Mason has been a revelation as a sixth man, and the Bulldogs twice fought back from second-half deficits last weekend to get here.

They won in Cambridge last year, briefly taking control of the league before a late season collapse. In an eerily similar situation, Harvard won the league title on Yale’s home floor—celebrating in effusive fashion. Jones, Sears, and co. would like nothing better than to return the favor—and finally break through—Friday.

On to the picks:

COLUMBIA AT PENN

The two schools have been in Ivy League athletics news recently for all the wrong reasons. Penn underwent the shame of watching its coach of nearly 20 years supposedly retire from football altogether…and then join the Columbia football program only three weeks later.

Columbia, well, has student newspapers writing columns celebrating losses from December. Slack has to be given, however, now that the Spectator’s previous favorite subject—a turbulent football coach who coached like Madden’s Rookie Mode and took criticism like the Currier Ten-Man—is gone.