New York City offers just about every kind of attraction and diversion a person could imagine, but not so much for fans of big time college sports (men’s basketball and football). There is no Kansas or a UConn on the hardcourt or an Ohio State or a Penn State or an Oregon on the gridiron. Long ago, in 1950, City College stormed through the NIT and NCAA basketball tournaments, the only team ever to win both in the same year. St. Johns did place second in the NCAA tourney in 1952 and got to the Final Four in 1985. In football, Vince Lombardi was a player for Fordham and later a coach, but his glory came later. Saturday night saw top ranked Notre Dame crush undefeated Army at Yankee Stadium, but still, both teams are visitors. However, there is a NCAA Division 1 football program in town at Columbia, and Saturday the Lions clinched their first Ivy League crown in more than 60 years, beating Cornell 17-9 uptown at Kraft Field aka Wien Stadium, which for old timers was called Baker Field. In the nearly 70 years of the Ivy League as a formal athletic conference, Columbia only had one other championship. Now they are best again (tied with Dartmouth and Harvard). Columbia’s football may not be a Dartmouth, which has 22 crowns, or a Harvard, with 19 Ivy League titles, but this season they are at the top. Their earlier championship was in 1961, the first year of Jack Kennedy’s presidency, when they tied with Harvard. Champions! At last! For a program that started in 1870, only following Princeton and Rutgers by a year, the long legacy has not been shining. There was the record losing streak of 44 games from 1983 to 1988 or the more recent back-to-back winless seasons 10 years ago or even when the university administration just a few years ago was fighting with the school’s band, which was banned from playing at football games and then disbanded. The years of despair make this achievement even sweeter for the 4,224 fans who showed up for the Cornell game on Saturday, even though it was far from the capacity of Kraft/Wien/Baker’s 17,000 (which is 90,000 fewer than Michigan Stadium holds). The Lions success of their unpaid student athletes is even greater when compared to New York now also being home to two of the worst teams in the NFL, with the very well compensated Jets and Giants combined for only five victories and 17 defeats, an embarrassing .227 winning percentage. No Super Bowl for them, more like the toilet bowl. As for the amateurs, New York City lacking the superstars of college football and basketball also means that we’ve avoided the big business of college sports with huge contracts for TV rights and the pressure on schools and coaches to field players who may not always be ready for college-levels academics. Not so for Columbia players, who still have to complete the same Core Curriculum as other undergrads on campus. This is the end of their season. Despite being champs, the Lions will not advance to any postseason games or bowl appearances. Their one and only trip to a bowl was the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day in 1934, almost 91 years ago, beating Stanford 7-0. That was actually the last postseason game for any Ivy League football team.