Other than the final weekend of the season when Ivy League Titles are on the line, and the rare occasions when an Ivy team scares the daylights out of some loftily-ranked, overconfident, basketball powerhouse in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament, the first weekend of the new year is always a great time for the Ancient Eight's hardwood warriors.
To begin with, every team starts with a clean slate and, in the topsy-turvy and often parity-stricken world of Ivy Hoops, just about anything can happen.
Doormats can claim to be darkhorses. Also-rans can, for a few days anyway, consider themselves to be in the thick of a chase for a championship banner.
Just about everyone is healthy, and just about everyone is looking forward to butting heads with Ivy League rivalries that, in the case of the men, predate the birth of their grandfathers.
It's a time of new hope, but it's also a time to give thanks for one basic fact: the non-league schedules are almost complete.
No self-respecting coach - especially not one on a recruiting trip - would ever admit it, but they get sick and tired of being spanked by big scholarship schools with even bigger basketball budgets.
Both the men's and the women's leagues are relatively strong this year, but even still, they're barely winning 40 percent of their games.
And some of the scores are plain embarrassing for the men and women. Cornell's men lost consecutive games to Syracuse and Maryland by a total of 87 points. Columbia's women's average margin of defeat is somewhere in the low 20s.
Dartmouth's men had those two beatings in the Midwest (Valparaiso 100, Dartmouth 54; Iowa 104, Dartmouth 65). The Harvard women have gotten plastered by nearly forty points twice this season.
Indeed, the Penn men - despise them as we may for handing inter-league foes similarly lopsided scores - are really the pride of the league. The Quakers are 6-1 and getting attention from national pollsters. The team's one loss was an 83-80 shaving on the road at Big Ten powerhouse Ohio State.
At the Washington Holiday Tournament, Penn clipped the hosts 71-68 in the opening round then beat Southeast Conference contender Georgia in the finals 81-79.
But, other than the Penn men, no Ivy League teams are threatening any established elite or major conference teams. Certainly, this is to be expected given the Ivy League's rigorous academic requirements and, more importantly, its long-standing ban on athletic scholarships.
No one in the league wants to alter these "handicaps." The Ivy League is proud of setting the standard in producing scholar athletes.
Still, after more than a month of struggling against scholarship schools, it's nice to finally be playing on an even court again.
