Men's Soccer Loses Heartbreaker

In the World Cup it never ends like this.

The second-half clock passes the 45-minute mark, and the crowd begins to whistle or jeer for the referee to blow his whistle three times and end the game.

But only that one man knows how much time is left, and the end of the game comes only at the discretion of the man in black.

College soccer isn't like this. The referee instructs the scoreboard operator to stop the clock with each injury or goal stoppage, and when the clock read, say, "0-04" in Tuesday's men's game between Harvard and New Hampshire, there were exactly four seconds to play.

Or roughly one second for each antacid tablet Crimson Head Coach Stephen Locker might have needed to swallow at that very instant.

Because after another 90 minutes of Harvard territorial dominance, after virtually the entire game had been spent in the Wildcats penalty area, a late, almost ridiculous goal stole the game for the visitors by a 2-1 margin.

"You almost have to have been at the game to understand how much we dominated," sophomore Will Kohler said.

But at the end of the day, Harvard's record fell to 1-3-0 (1-1-0 Ivy and the Crimson could only explain it through superstition.

"I replayed the entire sequence [of the last goal] in my head, and I think I would have done the same thing," sophomore keeper Peter Albers said. "The goal certainly didn't go in for lack of effort on our part."

But it did go in, the culmination of a series of events which began in the UNH end with only 20 seconds remaining. A Harvard attack on net diminished, the Wildcats pushed the ball forward and gained a throw-in, a cross was launched towards Albers and then...

1) Albers charged off his line, trying to punch the ball away; he did, only to see it

2) fall at the feet of a UNH striker, who tried to chip the four Crimson defenders still lurking in the box and covering for Albers; any one of them could have cleared it away easily, but

3) freshman winger Ricky Le's attempt at a header only succeeded in redirecting the ball over the other three defenders, flicking the ball

4) into the net.

"It's too bad, because Ricky played such a good game, and he's been doing great all year," captain Pepper Brill said. "I told him to keep his head up."

There is no reason for anyone wearing Harvard's home black and white to get blue in the face over these early-season losses--each one of them has come against a class opponent, and the schedule keeps bombarding the Crimson with more of them.

National powerhouse Clemson is next, and Harvard may have to face the Tigers without the services of Kohler, who suffered minor ligament damage in one of his ankles early in the first half and is likely out for at least a week.

"It was a physical game, partly by design on UNH's part, because it seemed they were intent on knocking our forwards around all game," Brill said, in spite of the fact that no yellow cards were assessed.

UNH scored first in the 25th minute, but Harvard's Steve Gaffney collected his first goal of the season in a goalmouth scramble 10 minutes later to make it 1-1 at halftime.

And the Crimson found it uncomfortably easy to settle into what has become a familiar pattern at the start of the second, creating many chances but taking none of them.

"We really played hard, and our intensity was there all game," Brill said. "We can't let our confidence slip just because of the way the game ended--we have the talent to play with anyone in the country."

But coming on the heels of the UConn game, where Harvard gave up a goal with under five minutes to play that tied a game it eventually lost in overtime...with ends like these, who needs enemies of a higher caliber?

"With 20 seconds to go, it seemed like everyone was waiting for overtime," Kohler said. "I guess having the time [displayed on the clock] creates more drama for the fans, but I wish we could be on the winning end of one of these so I could say how that felt."