Fantastic voyage for Ivy's best b-baller

There is a story or two in everyone, some just cover more range than others. Hana Peljto's story, then, would be a supersonic jet, an ocean liner, a 1991 Mercury Tracer swerving across a freeway lane.

"Don't we want 94?" a classmate said from the passenger seat.

"Yes," I said. "So?"

"You're going onto 694."

Swerve.

Hana was in the backseat then, signing my yearbook and laughing as the feisty Tracer (Tracy, to me) righted itself in the correct lane, our stories overlapping for a chapter.

"I knew the car was in good hands," she said Tuesday night, reflecting back on the incident.

That makes one of us.

Her story vaults from Bosnia to Canada to Minnesota to Tracy's backseat to Harvard, and tonight it will be making its fourth and final interlude in Princeton as Hana, a senior center on the Harvard women's basketball team and the Ivy League's best player for the past three years, comes into town to take on the Tigers at Jadwin Gym.

Born in Bosnia, Hana had to leave home with her family at age 10 to escape the dangers of war. The Peljtos ended up in Slovenia, where she first was introduced to hoops, then Canada. Almost four years after Hana left home, she found Minnesota and my school system.

"By the time we got to Minnesota, we had moved every year for about six years," Hana said. "You get used to moving and not settling, not attaching to people."

But there in the upper midwest, an unlikely refuge, Hana found her place to settle. Her story, however, did not settle down.

Rise to the top

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She pursued basketball in the states and in junior high was playing in Osseo High School head coach Dave Thorpe's basketball camp.

"It was almost too good to be true to have a coach that positive," Hana said. "He was one of the reasons I went to Osseo."

Hana played varsity for three years, losing in the section playoffs in each of her first two. In her senior year her popularity was growing and she emblazoned her memory in the minds of everyone in the community.

On March 25, 2000 I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder amidst a sea of orange and black shirts, hats, gloves, and leggings. My Osseo classmates and I were waiting for the start of the Minnesota big-school girls' basketball championship at Williams Arena, home to the university's Golden Gophers. At that time Osseo had exactly two state titles to boast, both from so long ago they may as well have been fake.

Osseo mowed their way into the title game, garnering their section's top seed with a 19-3 record, and cruising to the state tournament after a 22-point win in the section semifinal and a 14-point win against one of the state's best in the final.

After that, Osseo beat 21-3 North St. Paul in the first round of state thanks to a 49-8 run over the middle two quarters. In the semis, Osseo dispatched Blaine 51-35 to reach the championship behind 16 points and 15 rebounds from Hana, an off-game of sorts.

Our opponent in the final: newly-formed Eastview with a modest 17-9 record and an impressive upset over No. 2 Roseville in the semifinals. The unranked lightning took the early lead, 3-2, but were blindsided from there on out. The Orioles, behind Peljto, built the lead up every quarter on the way to an 80-53 win.

"The team had a great chemistry," Hana said. "It felt like nothing could go wrong for us."

And nothing did. Peljto saved her best Osseo game for last. She scored 34 points on 14-19 shooting and grabbed 18 rebounds in the biggest game of her career as the Orioles won the state's supreme prize.

Though she admits it sheepishly, with all due respect to her Harvard teammates, Hana cites that night in March 2000 as her best sports memory and teammates Heather Bertram and Lauren Podratz, both recruited to Division I schools, as her favorite to play with.

"There was such a wonderful community surrounding our team," Hana said. "I'll always remember how great it felt to win, not only for our team but for everyone who supported us."

The team returned to Osseo that night for a victory party. I fought my way through the crowd to Hana, hugged her, congratulated her.

"I just may follow you to Harvard," I said.

I don't remember what she said in response, only the smile that won her face, a smile that had 18 years of perseverance and a whole future of possibility wrapped up in it.

On to Harvard

Life changed after that state championship, for everyone in little ways. Hana went through the biggest change of all as she moved on to the glamour of Harvard after three years in a high school surrounded by farm land, county highways, and middle-class housing.

"I never thought I was going to go to Harvard," Hana said. "This was the only Ivy League school I visited. I met my coaches and teammates and a lot of the misconceptions I had about Harvard were falsified."

Only Hana didn't just go to Harvard, she conquered. She won Ivy League Rookie of the Year honors her freshman year and Player of the Year honors the last two years while leading the Crimson to two consecutive Ivy titles. Just yesterday she was named to First Team Academic All-America for the second consecutive year. So yes, she deserves to be at Harvard for more than just her jump shot. Not content with being the best in Minny, she now rules a new market.

"I went through a transition phase," Hana said, though transition is nothing new to her. "It was a reality check, but I still have my support system from high school. Getting through that was challenging, but I had a lot of help."

Osseo doesn't often send people to the Ivy League. It grew out of a once-rural town just north and west of Minneapolis that was caught in the whirlwind of urban sprawl and could not pull free to keep up. Its reputation over the years has oscillated between "hick" and "thug," with "prestigious" never being one of the classifications. Until this year, in fact, there were only two graduates from Osseo in the Ivies — myself and Hana.

To the people of Harvard and the people of Osseo, Hana Peljto has a similar rap sheet. At both schools she came from nowhere, entering Harvard after graduating with honors from little-engine-that-could Osseo, entering Osseo after winding up in Minnesota after the flight from war-torn Bosnia as a young girl. At both schools she has won all sorts of team and individual awards.

"I can't really compare them. It's almost a completely different circumstance," Hana said of the similar accolades. "They were rewarding because all my awards were correlated with team success. Winning the Ivy title and winning the state are some of my greatest memories."

She has two collegiate basketball games left — tonight against our Tigers and tomorrow at Penn. The Crimson (13-11 overall, 6-5 Ivy League) will not make the NCAA Tournament for a third straight year, and Hana is unsure about her odds of sweeping the Player of the Year honors, but her 23.8 points per game is the second highest total in the nation, and she just may be the best women's player the Ivy League has ever seen. I recommend you come out and watch before this talent goes back to her source.

Forward and backward

Hana, a psychology major, plans to continue in basketball after graduation, hopefully returning home, really home, to Europe to play professionally. And she isn't ruling out the WNBA, if the league survives until she's ready to give it a shot.

Hana's story is not ending but every chapter pulls her one more step away from the days at Osseo, when Heather and Lauren were at her side and she could look into the stands on any given night, no matter where the game was, and see all of her closest friends giving her their best from the stands to repay all her efforts on the court.

Osseo has changed immensely since that night when I made my premonition to Hana. The gym in which she won all her home games has been converted into cafeteria space to accommodate the increasing population. In its place, a new gym was built as an extension to the building to keep the school, an architectural disaster of boring early 20th Century, hideous middle 20th Century, and practical modernity, up with the times athletically. The main office has been moved and remodeled, a great seal now rests on the floor inside the main entrance to try and force prestige.

"I was definitely ready to go to college, but I do miss high school," Hana said. "The Osseo community was just a great place for everyone — teachers, students, athletes. I missed a lot of that community feel when I came to college."

The days of community have been swept behind, as have most of our college careers, and the memories fade as Reality reaches its claws out. Hana Peljto will graduate from Harvard this year and will go on to succeed, I'm sure, in whatever she does. Her story will take her back to Europe, but Osseo, Harvard, and women's basketball in general will not forget what this regular girl with an extraordinary past did for two communities and one sport.

As I closed the final interview I'll ever request of Hana, she offered a piece of sage journalism advice.

"You can just quote me on whatever you want," she said. "I'm sure you'll do a great job."

Some things never change.

So tonight I'll be there, front and center at Jadwin. I'm used to seeing Hana in the orange and black of Osseo, not the crimson that was the color of our arch-rivals. In my head, she always will be in Osseo garb. And in my head, we'll always be cruising Tracy into the Twin Cities, thinking as naive kids will that we own the world, and never doubting that youth is one long, sprawling Fitzgeraldian sentence that never has a period.