this is the weather that birthed basketball.  our so far bitter northeast winter evokes warm memories of overheated, sweat stinking gymnasiums and young athletes running the hardwood.  no more appropriate opponent, then, for the lions to finish 2017 against than the maine black bears from frigid orono.  doubly appropriate since the lions started the year […] Read more »

one day after playing perhaps their worst game of the year, a gritty lion squad ended the penn basketball team’s five game winning streak and put themselves in position to play in the first ivy league post season hoops tournament. it was the most thrilling new york – philly dust up in, almost exactly, 38 […] Read more »

the lions five traveled to philadelphia on february 10th and fell to a previously winless (in league) pennsylvania crew.  the failure is gruesome enough given the quakers’ previous ineptitude but columbia managed to revert to those behaviors it had seemed to overcome recently.  no one scored other than the core three – petrasek, hickman and […] Read more »

last weekend, the lion hoops crew split two rousing battles in front of nearly packed houses.  the games against yale and brown both featured the lions’ now tough, if not impenetrable, 2 – 3 zone, improved three point shooting and increased offensive contributions from the bench.  those three things resulted in a win over the […] Read more »

columbia’s basketball team has won 20 games for the second time in the last three years and will almost certainly be playing after the end of the ivy league season. unless an incalculably unlikely series of events transpire, however, they will not be playing in the big dance, the ncaa tournament.  what a bitter draught […] Read more »

one should forgive the preoccupation of the some 2,500 fans filing into levien last friday. though the evening’s assignment was “beat the crimson,” most of us were gathered in hasty grief counseling sessions, trying to wrap our heads around the sudden, stunning overtime loss to princeton the saturday prior.  that game had seemed so well […] Read more »

as paulie b fled levien gymnasium last saturday, struck half blind and nauseous by the magnitude of the just befallen disaster, he more resembled, as did so many lion rooters heading for the exits, a concussed resident of herculaneum fleeing  his pumice buried city than a disappointed sports fan leaving an arena.  speech was impossible, […] Read more »

the columbia lions men’s basketball team returns to levien gymnasium this weekend in second place in the ivy league.  a 5 – 1 record, fashioned over three weeks on the road would ordinarily be reason for immense self-congratulation, but, we expect, this crew rues that sole blemish on the report card more than the handful […] Read more »

five weeks ago, the columbia men’s basketball team traveled to long island and battled the america east conference power stony brook seawolves.  the light blue led by as many as seventeen points on their way to a nine point loss.  it was a game that left many of us shaking our heads at a talented, […] Read more »

columbia started its journey to the ivy league title and a place in the ncaa tournament as well as possible, edging the cornell big red at levien, 74 -70, on the 16th and then whipping the ithacans at newman arena, 79 – 68.  two weeks into league play and the lions are tied for first […] Read more »