With seven minutes left in Saturday's game, Harvard cut a nine-point deficit down to nothing. Suddenly the game looked over, Harvard had all the momentum and loss number 10 seemed imminent for the Big Green. Then something strange happened -- the crowd cheered. Steve Callahan hit a three to retake the lead -- and the crowd cheered more. Finally, something happened almost as surprising as the crowd --- Dartmouth won.
As strange as it is to see Dartmouth win, I have seen it before. The crowd, however, I have not seen before. This, after all, was men's basketball. Rarely do crowds come to men's basketball, and never do crowds cheer for men's basketball. Cheering is for things like hockey and John Kerry, certainly not for an exciting game like basketball.
I would like to be able to say that Saturday's crowd is a sign of things to come, and not just the product of a boring Saturday night and the world's hatred of those smart kids over at Harvard. Maybe the crowd was impressed with the game and the atmosphere enough to come again, maybe even bring friends with next time! But let's be honest, this isn't exactly Duke or Kansas. At Kansas, kids sleep in a hallway for days to get tickets to big games. At Duke, a shanty town is constructed in lieu of a line; tents are occupied for weeks to get tickets. At Dartmouth, there are no tickets. Saturday was easily the largest crowd I'd ever seen at a basketball game, and no tickets were given to students; no one was even paying attention to the number of students for the fire code. Why should they? In the rowdy world of college basketball, we're standing aloof in the corner with one real fan and a ridiculous 20-person band.
This brings up the question of cause. Does our basketball program stay in the depths of Division I (319 out of 326 in the Sagarin ratings last year, currently 306 of 332) because of the apathy of the student body, or is the student body apathetic because of the losing ways of the program? The answer is probably a little of both, but I for one think we should do something about it. Although the late, great Leon Pattman has remained quiet about his recent departure from the team, I can't believe that he would have left if we had 200 screaming students at every game. What recruit wouldn't be more likely to come to Dartmouth if we brought real energy to home games?
What can you do for the team? Come to the games. Wear green. Paint your body green and form the letter D. Whatever, just come to the games, bring a friend, bring a drunken friend who'll scream at the refs, as long as you're loud and present. If you do that, nothing can keep us down for long, and it won't even matter what Karl Furstenberg does. And if that doesn't work, you can always wait and cheer for spring duck-hunting season, I'm told the secret is to wear orange.
