The Harvard men’s basketball team’s record-breaking 2011-12 season was brought to an official end this week with the squad’s annual banquet at the Harvard Club of Boston. The event marked a wrap-up of the past year—its best moments exemplified in a ten-plus minute highlight video—as well as the official start of next season.

That meant it was time for me, too, to share my final thoughts on 2011-12, and look ahead to 2012-13 as well.

First, there’s this season, as the scores of missed opportunities during Harvard’s first NCAA Tournament appearance in 66 years still raise questions of what could have been.

For example, what if Laurent Rivard, who was on fire all game, had played more than six minutes in the first half?

What if Tommy Amaker hadn’t decided to go small after Kyle Casey picked up his second foul? (At that point, with the score tied at 20, Amaker’s frontcourt consisted of Keith Wright and four guards against a Vandy lineup that contained the 6’11 Festus Ezeli and the 6’7 Jeffrey Taylor. Those two proceeded to collect back-to-back offensive rebounds on the next Comodores possession, Vandy exploded on a 13-3 run before the break, and from there it was a totally different game).

What if the refs hadn’t blown the call on the Oliver McNally “turnover” that he actually threw off a Vanderbilt player with a minute to go?

What if Harvard didn’t make dozens of silly mistakes, like Corbin Miller dribbling the ball off his leg—leading to an easy Jenkins dunk—towards the end of the first half and Casey missing a slam at the beginning of the second?

What if the Crimson had beaten Penn at home in the first place—would it have gotten a higher seed and avoided a “second” round matchup with an uber-talented Commodores squad that was basically the worst possible matchup for it?

Would things have turned out differently? Who knows. But Harvard showed a lot of fight and did itself proud against a Vanderbilt team that will always be the only squad to beat Kentucky on a non-buzzer beater this year.

And so now, it’s time to move on and turn our attention to next season, for Crimson Madness 2012 is only 153 days away.

At the banquet, Amaker mentioned that his overarching goal was to form a men’s basketball dynasty in Cambridge. And his commitment to Harvard has never seemed greater than it has this month, when he turned down the chance to interview for the South Carolina and LSU jobs.

Before getting into that whole dynasty thing, let’s take it one step at a time, and focus on next year: Can Harvard do what the great Penn and Princeton teams routinely did in the 1970s-90s, or what Cornell did from 2008-10, and pull off a three-peat?

Unlike my fellow beat-writer Martin Kessler, I say yes, with the caveat that winning the 2012-13 title will be a far greater challenge than it was this season (and even then, it was hard). The Crimson is losing a lot, starting with its co-captains, Wright and McNally, as well as freshman Corbin Miller, who will take two years off for his LDS mission.

Harvard will miss Wright’s rebounding, production in the paint, and ability to block shots; it will miss McNally’s leadership, heart, and free-throw shooting (the latter of which bailed out the Crimson down the stretch numerous times this past year); and it will miss Miller’s three-point prowess that could change the dynamic of a game at any second.

The team now has gaping holes at the five and the two. At center, Harvard has a ton of guys who could potentially get minutes—sophomore Ugo Okam, freshmen Steve Moundou-Missi, Kenyatta Smith, and Jonah Travis, and incoming freshmen Agunwa Okolie, Mike Hall, and Evan Cummins. Amaker won’t be able to run the offense through anyone in that group, as he did with Wright, but he should nonetheless be able to find one capable starting center.