One could look at the men's basketball team's 60-56 win over Dartmouth on the weekend and draw parallels to the 1999-2000 season. The Crimson occupy the exact same position it held last year after playing similar games against Dartmouth.

Last season, the Crimson stood at 7-7, 2-0 in the Ivies, at the same point. Harvard's record now stands at 7-5, and its two victories over the Big Green (2-9, 0-2) give it a perfect Ivy League record and the division lead early in the season.

When the Crimson played the Big Green before break in 1999, it shocked its opponent, winning 66-59 with a lineup that included four freshmen. Before this year's holiday, Harvard took on Dartmouth at home, pulling off an incredible one-point victory in the closing seconds.

To complete the sweep last season, the Crimson slugged it out with Dartmouth in Hanover. The matchup featured several lead changes, poor shooting and a general ugliness that left the Crimson exhilirated and Dartmouth exhausted.

Saturday's game followed a similar script.

When two teams play each other twice in a short amount of time, as Harvard and Dartmouth do each year, they familiarize themselves with each other's game plans and players, which leads to the good defense and low scoring.

The Big Green are almost the same team as last year: a long-range scoring threat that lives and dies by the three. In the second game last season, its star shooter, Greg Buth, was held to 1-of-7 from beyond the arc. The Crimson marked Buth again on Saturday, keeping him to 1-of-13 shooting and 0-of-6 from three-point range.

So when the final buzzer sounded after the four-point Harvard win, it might have been easy for someone to say that history was repeating itself.