Harry How/Getty Images
It's the first NCAA tournament win in the history of the school, and it comes in a year that no one expected.
Harvard was really good last year. They rose into the Top 25 and got a 12-seed in the tournament before getting bounced in the first round.
Then, right before the 2012-13 season, two of the teams best players — Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry — withdrew from school as part of a widespread academic cheating scandal.
Princeton — which was the near unanimous favorite to win the Ivy League — was in firm control of the league throughout the year. But then they fell apart in the final week of th season, losing two games on back-to-back nights and letting Harvard sneak into the automatic NCAA bid.
So it wasn't exactly a storybook season, but at the end of the day Harvard found their way into the tournament and pulled the upset. It just shows how solid of a program coach Tommy Amaker is building there that they were still competitive enough to beat a 3-seed in a "down year."
They thoroughly outplayed New Mexico (who was a trendy Final Four pick among basketball nerds), and it was a deserving win.
So congratulations to the underdogs at Harvard!
Here's a taste of how the Harvard community responded.
Jeremy Lin was really happy:
YYYYYEEEEESSSSSSSSS!!! HARVARD winssss!!! hahahahhah i told you.... #threepointgoggles #bracketbusters twitter.com/JLin7/status/3…
— Jeremy Lin (@JLin7) March 22, 2013
And the satrical Harvard Lampoon fired out a solid-gold tweet:
America, we are sorry for messing up your brackets and also your financial system and everything else.
— Harvard Lampoon (@harvardlampoon) March 22, 2013
They play Arizona next.