A frustrating night for the Quakers

PRINCETON - Zack Rosen stared at the stat sheet, shaking his head. His head kept right on shaking as his eye found more and more numbers. Penn's sensational point guard finally flicked the paper away with a finger like a poker player folding his cards. His coach saw Rosen drop his head into a hand.

"Zack, pick your head up," Jerome Allen told him at the postgame news conference

For Rosen, there was no nothing but angst to take away from Jadwin Gym Tuesday night. Playing for a share of the Ivy League title and a playoff date with Harvard, the Quakers couldn't keep Princeton from the rim and couldn't find the inside of it themselves. They looked off-kilter early and quickly fell behind big.

Coming from behind is a tough way to go when you're playing for your life.

"Turnovers . . . it all adds up. Took all good shots," Rosen said, after scanning the 8 for 24 shooting next to his name in the 62-52 defeat. "Again, it's frustrating. The one Harvard game and here. The shots were just missing. Like Coach said, sometimes it goes in, sometimes it doesn't. I mean, I put in all the work."

It wasn't just the shots last night that decided the Ivy League. Maybe it was a missed box-out late in the night at Yale. A couple of shots, normally routine, that didn't fall against Harvard at the Palestra. Anybody in a Penn uniform can probably pick out a personal play. They'll all feel that pain in five years.

"I'm going to be really [ticked]," Rosen said. "Tomorrow."

Allen pointed out that Princeton didn't really have anything to play for other than playing the spoiler.

"How can a team that's playing for nothing play harder than a team that's supposedly playing for something?" Allen said. "That's really what blew my mind. OK, the ball wasn't going in. But defensively, they just got whatever they wanted, backdoors, offensive rebounds, open jump shots, layups."

Later, Allen added, "It can't be a function of fatigue. You have 40 minutes of your life to have something to share with your grandchildren."

But Allen also knows as well as anybody that Penn-Princeton is its own entity, separate from the Ivy standings. The Tigers had something to play for. The same group that had kept Harvard out of last year's NCAA tournament put the Crimson in this time. Early on, two signs were held up by Princeton's band. It's not that I like Harvard. . . . It's that I hate Penn.

Down 23-6 early, Penn climbed within three points in the second half. But Princeton didn't falter. With 71/2 minutes left in the game, Princeton had made 15 of 19 shots from inside the three-point arc. It didn't matter right then that Penn had taken 11 more shots, and eventually forced 20 Princeton turnovers. The Tigers made sure Rosen's only decent looks were from deep. Quakers fans had grown to expect superhuman feats from him. Maybe he'd grown to expect them himself.

As Rosen shook his head at those numbers, his four-year roommate, Rob Belcore, sat next to him, eyes red, and said, "The guy sitting to my right, he's going to need a month off for as tired as his back has got to be. As long as he was going to take the floor with me, I legitimately believed, I thougth he could carry us the whole way. We almost did. I think we let him down."

The two roommates had spent many nights alone in the Palestra.

"After freshman year, we were so ticked the way the season turned out," Rosen said the other day, sitting in the Palestra. "We would play one-on-one all night in here, I swear."

Second place in the Ivies, better than anyone predicted, 19-12 overall, 11-3 in the league, with a possibility for postseason play.

"Whether you're close or not," Rosen said, "you're not close."

Belcore said the player sitting next to him had been the best player in the Big Five this season and the best player in the Ivy League.

"As long as I was with him, I knew we had more than a puncher's chance," Belcore said, before they walked out together in stocking feet. This had been a chance nobody saw coming, but still a chance they left behind.