Opportunity knocked on Friday for the Harvard women's basketball team, but the Crimson wasn't ready to answer.

When the Crimson was ready to answer on Saturday, opportunity just didn't knock.

This weekend, Harvard came out with a chance to run the table on its last three games against Columbia, Cornell and first-place Dartmouth to force a tie atop the Ivy League with Dartmouth and Penn, assuming both teams would win their other remaining games.

But first things first. Before tomorrow's showdown with the Big Green in Hanover could happen and have any playoff implications, the Crimson (16-9, 9-4) needed to beat the Lions (7-18, 6-8 Ivy) and the Big Red (11-15, 3-11), two teams relegated to the rest of the Ivy pack.

An easy task, right?

Well, at least theoretically. This is the Ivy League, where up can suddenly become down and, on any given night, the last-place team can beat the first-place team, as happened earlier this year when Brown knocked Harvard out of a tie for first.

Friday, against Columbia in the Crimson's most recent "biggest game of the year," Harvard started off as a ball of nerves.

The Lions came out equally flat, failing to score at all in the first eight minutes, but the Crimson couldn't answer opportunity's call, scoring just nine points over the same period of time.