A tough end for basketball; hope alive for hockey

You might have known that this basketball season, marked by last-second wins and losses and a two-month-long title race with Harvard, would come down to one last basket. Unfortunately, that basket, the deciding two-pointer in a playoff of Ivy cochampions for a trip to the NCAA Tournament today, was Harvard’s, a jumper by Steve Moundou-Missi with nine seconds left to make it 53–51 Crimson. A subsequent shot to tie it up by Javier Duren ’15 was unsuccessful, sending Harvard to the tournament four the fourth straight year and denying Yale its first trip to March Madness since 1962.

Though the denoument this afternoon at the Palestra in Philadelphia was hard for Bulldog fans to take, the team gave Yale more than its money’s worth this year, with exciting play by first-team All-Ivy standouts Duren and Justin Sears ’16 (the Ivy Player of the Year), a historic buzzer-beating upset of defending national champion UConn, and the team’s first share of an Ivy championship since 2002.

“As much as I want to be upset, it was really awesome to be a part of this experience,” Duren told the AP. “How many people get to play Yale-Harvard for an NCAA bid?”

The good news for Yale fans came out of Ingalls Rink this evening, where goalkeeper Alex Lyon ’17 recorded a shutout as the men’s hockey team beat Harvard 2–0 in the second game of a best-of-three ECAC quarterfinal series. (Harvard won the first game last night 3–2.) The winner of game three, tomorrow night at 7 at Ingalls, will go to the ECAC semifinals in Lake Placid.

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The Yale Alumni Magazine is published by Yale Alumni Publications Inc., an alumni-based nonprofit that is not run by Yale University. Its content does not necessarily reflect the views of the university administration.