Harvard and Yale. Duke and North Carolina. Michigan and Ohio State. Stanford and Cal. Georgetown and … who?

When confronted with naming their school’s premier athletic rival, the students of Georgetown are, for the most part, resonantly silent. That men’s basketball game against Notre Dame last year sure was exciting. And Fordham’s comeback defeat at Hoya homecoming probably hurt as much as Georgetown women’s lacrosse’s loss to Virginia in the 2004 NCAA semifinals.

But a school that Georgetown hates, a school that inspires fans to devise complicated intimidation methods and brings them to tears of joy or sorrow when the clock runs out? The search for a genuine rival has borne little fruit (other than the Syracuse Orange, that is).

The students of George Washington University believe they have found the answer. This year freshmen Victor Danau, Ariel Goldring and Will Mason applied their entrepreneurial spirit to the sale of T-shirts that read “F___ Georgetown,” and the garments have proven relatively popular on campus.

But on a Hilltop a bit northwest of GW, at a school that hasn’t faced GW basketball regularly since 1982, the shirts have evoked little more than indifference.

“I thought it was hilarious, because it’s just freshmen being freshmen,” says Elizabeth Buckel (SFS ’08), an officer of Georgetown’s super-fan group Hoya Blue. “It’s not really a rivalry, because Georgetown doesn’t think it is, but maybe GW does?”

“I think they’re just bitter,” Pep Band trumpeter Christine Hluchan (COL ’08) says, hearing of the GW trio’s product for the first time. “There isn’t really a rivalry because nobody at Georgetown cares about them.”

And so, the first lesson of rivalry-making becomes clear: A rivalry isn’t a rivalry unless both teams actually care.

Yet there are some at Georgetown who insist that the university does have its rivals – Villanova, among others – and, at very least, there are those who acknowledge several schools whose historical contact with Hoya teams comes close to justifying rivalry status.

Such claims deserve investigation. Let us examine, then, the three primary candidates for rivals of Georgetown and consider the arguments for their acknowledgement.

First, and perhaps most prominent in the minds of campus sports fans, is Villanova, the school that shocked Georgetown men’s basketball by two points in the 1985 NCAA Finals and has refused to stop celebrating since.

Pat McArdle (C ’72, L ’77), special assistant to the athletic director and the unofficial resident expert on Hoya sports archives, argues for Villanova “because of the proximity, the fact that they’re a Catholic school and [that] there historically has been a lot of admissions overlap. . Because of the Big East we continue to play them, but we were still playing in a lot of the same sports before.”

McArdle, then, introduces four new elements to the rivalry formula: geography, Catholic identity, academic similarity and regular contact. Of the four criteria, GW possesses only the first and, though some Georgetown students are happy to disagree, arguably the third.

“I don’t really think [the T-shirts are] appropriate, especially considering in terms of sports we don’t really play them in anything besides crew and tennis,” says Brett Clements (COL ’07), chair of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. “I don’t think it’s very warranted to have that, particularly since they’re not a rival in anything except for college admissions.”

But when it comes to Villanova, a prominent opponent in track and field, cross country and basketball, Georgetown is presented with an adversary at least both proximate and Catholic. And if we add the criterion of a rich and dramatic history, Georgetown-Villanova is in no short supply.

When the Hoya and Wildcat men’s basketball teams met last year on the 20th anniversary of the historic basketball upset, Villanova greeted Georgetown with a glowing halftime ceremony honoring the members of its championship team. Down 36-27 at the half, the Hoyas proceeded to rally to a victory of 66-64 – exactly the same score as the game in 1985.

“I sometimes think we should, 10 years from now, have an anniversary game of [the 2005] game, invite all of our players back and invite their players too,” McArdle says. “That was pretty sweet. . Even without ’85, I still think they’re our biggest rival.”

Yet a rival isn’t a rival unless both teams care, and despite last season’s result, Big East favorite Villanova may not count among its anticipated enemies a team expected to finish sixth. Athletic parity, then, will serve as our sixth and final criterion for evaluating potential rivalries.

Nor may the schools be a perfect match in terms of academics. A week ago at a concert in Philadelphia, this reporter was privy to a chance encounter between two students from Georgetown and Villanova, each with a shirt bearing the respective school’s name. Whereas one greeted his counterpart with the comment, “Friends don’t let friends go to Georgetown,” the Hoya did little else but stare blankly.

“I think of them as athletic rivals; I don’t think of them as academic rivals,” adds Hluchan, the trumpet player. Perhaps, for Villanova, it is the other way around.

Buckel, the Hoya Blue member, argues that Syracuse, another basketball-focused school, serves as Georgetown’s quintessential foe.

“There’s no question about it,” the Syracuse, N.Y., native says, praising the electricity that the matchup brought to the Carrier Dome when she attended Georgetown-Syracuse games as a child. “Anyone who remembers the old rivalry wants it back, because it was just so great.”

History is, indeed, on Buckel’s side. In 1980 the Hoyas made waves on the national scene when they overcame a 14-point halftime deficit to snap the Orangemen’s win streak, the nation’s best – at the last game ever played at the Orangemen’s old arena. Georgetown Head Coach John Thompson made a few more, proclaiming at the postgame press conference that “Manley Field House is officially closed.”

Georgetown became the team Syracuse loved to hate, as “Your Mother Is a Hoya” T-shirts circulated campus with regularity. The feeling appears to be mutual.

“It’s just so easy to hate Syracuse,” Buckel says. A 1984 article in THE HOYA, sure enough, is devoted to sharing “Ten Reasons” why.

And that’s just men’s basketball. Syracuse is a perennial lacrosse powerhouse, too, and the Orange broke some Hoya hearts when the men’s lacrosse team overcame a 6-2 third-quarter deficit to shock Georgetown, 12-10, in the last game of the 2003 season. While Georgetown has since enjoyed some recent dominance, every game against the Orange remains an event.

Syracuse, however, is not a Catholic university, nor does it typically compete for the same applicant pool as Georgetown. When it comes to the issue of athletic parity, thoughts of Syracuse and Connecticut, which face off in nearly every sport, are far more prevalent than those of Syracuse and Georgetown, which get people excited in only men’s basketball and men’s lacrosse. And the men’s lacrosse team doesn’t even play in the same conference as the Hoyas.

Finally, there is Fordham, a team with which Georgetown football has shared a field more than any other, albeit through some irregular periods of play.

In 1925 an unexpected, 27-0 Hoya win was dubbed “one of the greatest triumphs over its ancient enemy that [Georgetown] has ever achieved” by the Newark (N.J.) Evening News.

Like Georgetown, Fordham put its football program through a mid-century hiatus, and both teams picked the sport up in time for matchups in 1965 and 1970 that broke attendance records at Kehoe Field and in the Bronx.

In 1968 a trio of Georgetown students stole the Fordham Ram and presented it at Fordham’s homecoming painted blue and decorated in gray. A year later, a group of Fordham students attempted to duplicate the feat but, in a phone call to THE HOYA’s editor in chief, discovered that the live laboratory sheep they had stolen from the medical center was not, in fact, Georgetown’s mascot.

Fordham is a Jesuit school and common Patriot League football opponent, but the similarities end there. It lacks any presence in Georgetown’s other divisions of play, Big East and otherwise.

McArdle adds another caveat: Despite the teams’ shared history, “That doesn’t mean that everybody that ever played on a Georgetown [football] team would feel like Fordham was its biggest rival. We’re looking at it from the benefit of a historical perspective over time.”

What team, then, can lay unabashed claim to the title of Georgetown University’s primary athletic rival? The Hoya lacrosse teams have faced off numerous times against (out-of-conference) Duke in recent years, but in what other sport are the two teams competitive? The men’s basketball team’s legendary battles with St. John’s in the 1980s warranted side-by-side HOYA editorials of dueling allegiances, but does anyone even remember? Where has Maryland been since 2001?

If Georgetown doesn’t have a rival, McArdle argues, it’s because the Hoyas – nomads among the Big East, ECAC and Patriot League – have been subject to far less competitive stability than schools like Notre Dame, Stanford and Yale.

“Things change,” he says. “Alliances shift, rivalries shift, and it’s just because schools get bigger or distance [of travel] isn’t as important.”

As transportation technology developed, Georgetown football’s early rivalry with nearby Virginia became obsolete, as did Georgetown baseball’s frequent contests with Ivy League opponents once school administrators decided the players were missing too much class.

The consequence of such instability is a subject of disagreement among Georgetown fans.

“We don’t need a rival,” Hluchan says. “I think that people get excited enough about the big games. The Duke game this year is going to be huge [anyway]. . Playing teams on campus would do a lot more than having a rival.”

“I definitely do think it hurts sports because there’s no one big game, or several big games, in different sports to rally around each year,” says Clements, an Indianapolis native and Indiana fan. “I wish there was something like [Indiana-Purdue] here.”

Might the new additions to the Big East solve Georgetown’s rival problem? McArdle believes that “there’s every bit of that potential. I mean, for the first 10 years of the Big East . nobody would have said they think UConn is a big rival, but ask Syracuse now and they’d say UConn is their biggest rival, and probably vice versa. Things are fluid.”

Villanova, Syracuse, Fordham, Duke, St. John’s, Maryland, even GW – none may fulfill all six demands of a full-fledged rivalry, but maybe those schools are all rivals. Maybe they’re not.

One way or another, Georgetown athletics will subsist. Year after year, the goal is always the same. Rival or no rival, a championship is a championship.