Princeton's Rival? This Season, Look No Further Than Harvard

Classic Ivy League sports debate that no one actually plans on answering: Who is Princeton's rival?Some Tiger fans cling firmly to the geographical convenience of the supposed Penn-Princeton rivalry. Back in 2006, a columnist from the Daily Pennsylvanian noted that the rival stems almost exclusively from the two schools' dominance of Ivy League basketball. But this year, Penn was just an obstacle standing in the way of the Tigers' Ivy League run -- the men beat the Quakers handily to force the one-game playoff against Harvard, and the women (who continue their ridiculously dominant streak, stretching all the way back to last season) absolutely trounced Penn in their final game of the regular season, 78-27 (no, that's not a typo; it's a 51 point win).Aspirational sports fans, meanwhile, will tell you our rivals are Harvard and Yale, although neither school seems particularly interested in us. In a recent Deadspin article , a Harvard fan complained about choice of Yale as a "neutral site," noting, "How is Harvard having to play at their fiercest rival's court, where "neutral" fans that show up will automatically root against Harvard?" (Fair point, although the obvious counter would seem to be, everyone hates Harvard, so no where outside of Cambridge could ever be "neutral".)But this winter season, the games where we had the most to lose, and the contests we really cared about winning, were against Crimson athletes. And (here's the shift), it seemed like this season, Harvard cared about us, too.First and most obviously, there's the ubiquitous Harvard-Princeton basketball game this Saturday. The New York Times wrote a big feature on the Harvard team last week. The guys on PTI debated the merits of the Ivy League hoopsters. Catherine Ettman has been frantically emailing the student body with information on how to get tickets. This. Is. A. Big. Deal.But the basketball season has been less a question of historic rivalries and more a matter of who has the top two teams in the league this year. Harvard's Keith Wright won Ivy League player of the year; Princeton's Kareem Maddox won Defensive Player of the Year. Both were unanimous first team all-Ivy League; two more Tigers, Dan Mavraides and Ian Hummer, were named to the second team.Simply put, these are the two best teams in the league -- if Dartmouth happened to be really good this year, we'd be talking about potential Princeton-Dartmouth rivalries. Yeah, it's a little sweeter to get the win over Harvard. But at the end of the day, winning the League and going to the Big Dance is sweeter than beating whomever you had to in order to get there.No; the real rivalry against Harvard this season was not on the court but rather in the pool. Princeton swimming and diving, the two-time defending Ivy League champions, lost to Harvard earlier this year in the annual Harvard-Yale-Princeton tournament. The same day the men's basketball team lost at Harvard, the men's swimming team was at the Harvard pool competing for the Ivy League tournament and looking for a little revenge. They won the meet by 5.5 points, a ridiculously tiny margin (for reference, Princeton had 1400 points and Harvard had 1394.5 -- a different finish in any of the races could have been enough to turn the tables).Unlike basketball, where Harvard's rise is a change from recent years, Ivy League swimming has been dominated in recent memory by these two squads. Harvard and Princeton don't just care about winning -- they care about beating the other team.But swimming is the rare true rivalry against Harvard. And at the end of the day, does anyone care if Princeton lacks an official, agreed upon rival? We keep competing for Ivy League titles, and keep having to beat the best each year to do it. This year it's Harvard that's standing in our way. Next year maybe it'll be someone different. As long as we're in the mix for the title, I won't care who we're playing.