Singing the Beanpot Blues

After losing to B.U. in the first round of the Beanpot, 5-3, Monday night, the Harvard men's hockey team now has not beaten the Terriers in the opening round since 1961.

"I guess they've got our number," Harvard Coach Bill Cleary speculated after the game.

The Crimson was playing Monday in its fourth game in eight nights, a particularly grueling stretch of the schedule, but while some might offer this as an excuse for the icemen's poor play, truth is that Harvard played its best in third period, when it should have been even more physically exhausted then in the first two stanzas.

The Crimson just seems to be mentally out of synch.

Although it's hard to say that anyone on the team looked good during the first 40 minutes Monday, the new second line of Brian Busconi, Greg Chalmers and Tim Barakett continued to create good chances.

Chalmers is looking better and better every game back from his year-and-a-half layoff and starting to show that he is quite a heady player.

Don't think for a minute that Cleary will play his j.v. squad Monday.

While the Crimson mentor may rest some of his banged up players, like Barakett (shoulder), Randy Taylor (shoulder) and Lane MacDonald (shoulder and bruises everywhere else from playing in the slot), Cleary's reputation for making a mockery of the consolation game has been blown out way out of proportion.

Cleary may, however, give freshman John Devin, a Braintree, Mass, native, his first start in goal.

All of Cleary's decisions will be influenced by the fact that Boston College is a top-five team, that the Crimson has only two games in 10 days, that the team is slumping and that the icemen haven't won a Beanpot contest in their last seven tries.

Another factor might be that Cleary has 198 victories now and if the icemen top Princeton at home (Friday night, Bright Center, 7:30 p.m.), he would earn his 200th in the Garden, which should just be filling up by the end of the game.

The worst part of the consolation game, in my mind-anyway, is not playing in front of 12,000 empty seats in the first period and a half, but in front of 14,000 people who are not watching and who are talking about the upcoming championship game in the third.

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Cornell (9-3-1 ECAC), which the Crimson hosts a week from Saturday, has snuck into third place in the league.

Not so long ago, the Big Red was 4-3-1.

Cornell displaced Clarkson (10-4), which played the victim in the upset of the year Saturday night. Vermont (1-12 entering the contest) took the Golden Knights, 3-1, in Potsdam.

The shocker came after Clarkson fell to RPI, 7-4, the night before Keep in mind, that the only team Vermont had beaten before was winless Army.

The Cadets meanwhile, free from their once-around Division I schedule, have upped their overall mark to 12-12, after stumbling to an 0-11 ECAC record.

MacDonald was the only Harvard player named to the ECAC Honor Roll this week. The freshman was chosen for his hat trick and assist in Harvard's 7-1 win over Dartmouth.

If the ECAC playoffs started today, the matchups would be Princeton at RPI, Colgate at Harvard, St. Lawrence at Cornell and Yale at Clarkson.

The Hockey Notebook appears every Thursday in The Harvard Crimson