Twenty years from now, when the seniors on the 1997 baseball team return to Hanover for their 20th reunion, you can be sure they won't be chatting it up about the tail of their final season in the Green and White.
Yesterday, the baseball team ended their best campaign in 10 years with back-to-back losses to Harvard, 12-4 and 7-4, at Red Rolfe Field. It was the second straight Ivy weekend series in which Dartmouth was swept over four games.
Yes, the graduating seniors have seen better days than those of late.
Rest assured that tops on the list for reunion small-talk will be the streak -- the one that lasted 16 games -- and the same one that helped the 1997 baseball team rewrite the school record books.
"The 16-game streak was something special for this team," Spencer said. "It's not something that happens everyday."
The streak started on April 5 when the Big Green pulled off a 4-3 victory on the second side of a double-header against Penn. And it kept going from there, with Dartmouth sweeps over Ivy teams like Columbia, Princeton, Cornell and Brown.
It took three long weeks before the Big Green finally showed signs of a slowdown. With a fluky 6-2 loss to UNH just three days before Dartmouth's showdown with Red Rolfe division rival Yale, the team suddenly lost their momentum.
"When you're playing the Ivy games, you're playing four games over 48 hours and anything can happen," Spencer said. "Yale came out harder than we expected and that first loss against the Bulldogs was tough on us emotionally."
Alas, with the Big Green's final 1997 season record settled at 22-16 (11-9 Ivy), the time has come for the seniors to pass the torch to the younger players on the team. And it's a torch the '97s are proud to pass on.
"Nobody can take away all the good that this team did this season," Spencer said.
Next season, the Big Green will miss the talents of seniors Jon Aljancic, Mike Armstrong, Jimmy Meyer, Scott Simon and Spencer.
But rest assured, next year's team will still be a top contender for the Ivy crown.
"This team will be very strong for many years to come," Spencer concluded. "There's still a lot of talent that hasn't been tapped."
