In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, the two captains of the Harvard men’s basketball team—seniors Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry—have withdrawn from Harvard for the 2012-13 school year after being implicated in the Government 1310 cheating scandal, according to the New York Times.

Unequivocally, it’s a tragedy for the team and for Harvard athletics in general. Two of the school’s most recognizable faces—both on campus and around the country—leave under a shroud of uncertainty, seemingly guilty until proven innocent.

Some opportunistically have taken this chance as an “Aha!” moment. “See!” they’ll tell you. “We knew it all along. These guys aren’t like us! They don’t work as hard we do, don’t study like we do. They’re here just to play some game, not to learn. And this proves it! So, let’s get rid of them!”

Take, for instance, what senior Patrick Lane told the New York Times.

“[Some athletes] avoid academic challenges,” Lane said. “You know you won’t find them in a deductive logic course, but you will find them in a much less taxing sociology course. They sometimes exist apart, and collectively gravitate to the same majors…. It’s known.”

The article also added that “the news could reignite a contentious decades-old debate about athletes and academic integrity in the Ivy League.” In part, it is the debate about whether programs like the Harvard men’s basketball program—which has been accused of lowering academic standards to allow better players’ admission—should be allowed to grow and expand and increasingly become a player on a national stage. All of this, the critics will say, on the backs of these “less qualified” students.

All right, let’s debate. For now, allow me to focus only on the cases of Casey, Curry, and the Harvard men’s basketball team.

And it is here where I turn to that old political sage, Donald Rumsfeld.

“[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know,” Rumsfeld once said. “There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know.”

Let me begin with the latter. Here’s what I know I don’t know:

Having never covered a single basketball game, I don’t know what kind of people Casey or Curry are. I’ve never met either, never talked to either. I’ve never even seen Curry outside of a basketball-related event. I don’t know what kind of students they are, other than that Curry was Academic All-Ivy.

I don’t know what their exact situations are with regards to the cheating scandal. As has reported extensively, they’re implicated, but I don’t know if they’re guilty, and if so, how guilty they are.

And since I know nothing about either of those, I won’t speculate.

Here’s what I know I know:

I know their loss is a tremendous one for the Crimson. Casey was the biggest recruit in the history of the program and was a preseason favorite for Ivy League Player of the Year. Critics and players alike, though, have pointed to Curry as perhaps the team’s most important asset. And in that sense, it’s an absolute shame.

But I also know that Casey and Curry have both played critical roles in the rapid, historic turnaround of the men’s basketball programs.

And now, the big question: Why does that matter? Why should we care?

Sports, more than almost any other force I know, have the ability to unite communities, to bring people together in an almost magical way. Nothing can reduce grown men to tears, create instantaneous, massive ways of hugging and high-fiving, like sports can. And certainly, that feeling of camaraderie doesn’t end on the court or in the stands. It continues into the dining halls, into our everyday conversations, gives us something to root for, to smile about, even to dream about.

One friend at Georgetown once told me that during basketball season, people are friendlier to one another. At Duke, students rarely go abroad in the spring because of—you guessed it—basketball season.

Of course, the rejoinder is simple: We’re Not Georgetown or Duke, God Forbid. We’re Harvard. We’re not a basketball school. We’re an academic institution, damn it, and the finest one in the world at that.

But as I see it, having a nationally ranked basketball team doesn’t somehow diminish the school’s academic stature. Not at all. What can it do? Build community, school-wide community, a source of pride with undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni, with a reach and scope that very little else can match.

Last season, when Harvard made it to the NCAA tournament for the first time since the Truman Administration, we saw glimpses of that. And Casey and Curry were responsible for much of it.

And so, this I also know I know:

If you’ve been a part of that ecstatic throng to leap up and down on those crickety old Lavietes bleachers belting, “I believe that we will win,” you have Casey and Curry to thank.

If you stormed the court in March of 2011 following the Ivy title-clinching win against Princeton, you have Casey and Curry to thank.

If you never cared as much about a sports team until the 2011-12 version of Harvard men’s basketball, you have Casey and Curry to thank.

If you put down what you were doing on a random day during spring break to watch some basketball game in Albuquerque, you have Casey and Curry to thank.

And this I believe:

Maybe, thanks to the loss of its two stars, the men’s basketball team won’t repeat this season as Ivy champs. But despite that, and despite whatever infractions they did or did not commit, their impact on this school, as I see it, is still overwhelmingly positive. Casey and Curry have helped lay the groundwork for the long-term growth of this program, this team that united a community last year and has the ability to do so even more in the future.

And for that, Brandyn and Kyle, I say thank you.

—Staff writer Robert S. Samuels can be reached at robertsamuels@college.harvard.edu.

—Follow him on Twitter @bobbysamuels.