On Monday at noon, the Columbia baseball team will gather for what has become a happy, if unlikely, ritual. After practice, team members will go to an athletic complex lounge on 218th Street in Upper Manhattan and watch on television as their program is selected to the 64-team field of the N.C.A.A. tournament.

Tournament regional play is set to begin Friday, and an automatic berth goes to the Ivy League champion, which for the last three years has been the Columbia Lions.

Not even Lou Gehrig’s Lions could make that claim — the Ivy League did not exist when Gehrig played in the early 1920s, and his Columbia teams were barely .500. But his collegiate descendants are an emerging force in the Northeast.

Columbia (31-15) is not generally lauded for achievement in the high-profile sports. The football teams have been bad, basketball has been mediocre in recent years and hockey does not exist as a varsity sport. The baseball team endured 20 consecutive losing seasons from 1990 to 2009. Usually, when athletic success comes to Columbia, it surfaces quietly in sports such as fencing, tennis and archery. Columbia’s women’s archery team won national titles in both recurve and compound on Saturday.