Column: Playing spoiler shows excellence of Tigers’ program

In its final game of the regular season, the men’s basketball team allegedly had “nothing to play for.” I beg to differ, and surely many readers would as well. At halftime on Tuesday night, the floor was ceded to a group of middle-school kids for a quick scrimmage. They played hard, and they played to win. It doesn’t matter if it’s Carril Court or a high school gym or a pick up game in a suburban backyard — if the players take themselves seriously as people and as competitors, some part of them wants to win. That goes double if it’s in your backyard. But how large is that part? That’s the question that a spoiling team answers on the court.

A post mortem for a team that finishes third in its league isn’t supposed to feel bizarrely triumphant, and yet here we are. From the opening minute on Tuesday against Penn, Princeton looked like the bigger, faster and tougher team. The Tigers didn’t trail for a single second. It took the Quakers’ offense more than 16 minutes before the number on their side of the scoreboard finally turned to double digits.

Princeton, meanwhile, made confident cuts and strong moves to the basket and, for the most part, smart passes. They knocked down their shots. The Tigers may not have had as much on the line — though they still have a shot at a National Invitation Tournament bid — but that didn’t matter on Tuesday.

It’s tempting to say “they wanted it more,” but that’s rarely true, and it certainly wasn’t on Tuesday night — the Penn players were animated, guard Zack Rosen did a very mediocre Jimmer Fredette impression, and the lead was cut down to a single possession midway through the second half. Instead, it seems fairer to say that the Tigers looked like they knew how to win.

Here at Jadwin, that’s actually a modest assessment. The senior class (of three) will leave having gone 24-4 at home in Ivy League play, including 17 wins in a row, restoring Jadwin’s reputation as one of the toughest places to steal a game on the road. They leave intact the winning tradition, the expectation of winning, which looked so fragile in the middle of the 2000s. They leave behind at least one indelible moment: Doug Davis pump-faking on the wing in New Haven, floating, releasing and finally watching the swish from the floor. All in all, not too bad of a legacy.

Despite the departure of two key starters, it’s for these reasons that optimism is possible and even warranted. This looks like Harvard’s league to lose going forward, and it could be — they’re certainly more talented one through five.

But the Crimson is in the process of building something the Tigers already have: a standard of excellence, as dumb as that sounds, and a sense of pride in their system. Even though Harvard was the better team this year, I’m not sure they would beat Penn at home on the final day of the season if the circumstances were reversed and it was them, not us, “with nothing to play for.”

It’s a strange thing, but the win on Tuesday might have done as much to cement my fandom going forward into adulthood as anything else. If the tournament run last year was a massive high, a catharsis, then the final game of this season was a reminder that this is a dependable team, a steady and hardworking one, and that by choosing to play here, a student-athlete also chooses to never quit.

It’s overly sentimental, and it’s not rooted in anything concrete, and it’s probably something a fan can only ever feel about his or her alma mater, and yet here we are. I’ll be in the stands for the home opener in November.