A Queasy Stomach

I don't exactly know what's got me feeling this way. After all, Harvard did win its first ECAC quarterfinal game against Cornell last night.

But I've got some theories.

Was it an overdose of those scrumptious press Box cookies Harvard SID Kathy Leonard routinely sets out for us every home game?

Could I have caught the virus which forced senior Chris Baird to be a late scratch from the Crimson line up?

Might I somehow be in shock after hearing that Union defeated RPI, 4-3, in another ECAC quarterfinal game?

Or did Harvard's own lackluster effort make my entrails fizzle?

Whatever it is, what upset stomach preys on me mightly heavily. And I'm more than positive that some of it had to do with the goings on in the first and third periods last night at Bright Hockey Center.

As of 7:30 last night, I was expecting nothing less than a Crimson smashing of the significantly-less-than-Big Red. I was feeling fine, Harvard was pumped after the "Canton Miracle" of last weekend, and the entire ECAC knows by now that neither Eddy Skazyk nor Andy Bandurski is any good between the pipes.

Shock-to-the-System number one: after Ian Kennish and Brian Farrell both missed tough (but wide open) tip chances, it was Cornell's Jake Karam that got the game's first goal, off a clean two-on-one power play break into the Harvard zone.

And then to see Harvard's reaction...somnambulists, unite! Harvard went through one span of 90 seconds in which its on-ice manpower shifted between six, four, five, six, and then five again. Neither too-many-men penalty was called, and the self-imposed man-down situation didn't prove to be costly, but it was clear that the Crimson's collective intellect was still sleepwalking somewhere in the locker room.

"We were lucky, changing on the fly like that," Harvard Head Coach Ronn Tomassoni said. "There were a couple of instances where guys just weren't alert."

Whatever it was, senior Ian Kennish helped the Crimson crawl back to respectability, his garbage goal with 1:35 left in the first helped ease Harvard into the first intermission tied at 2-2, and when Harvard scored the game's next three goals--two of them coming from the trademark finishes of junior Steve Martins--it was surely all she wrote, warm-up-the-bus time.

Or may be not? Still leading by three with ten minutes to go, somewhere the Harvard subconscious recalled its first meeting with the Big Red this season: leading 5-1 at Lynah Rink, the Crimson barely Heimliched a serious choke situation, hanging on only for a 5-4 win.

And suddenly, two goals in just over four minutes made life a little more uncomfortable.

"We had 'em 5-2, and it should have been over with," Tomassoni said.. "Give them credit for fighting back, but we got too careless moving the puck in our own end."

Aside from a few key players--notably sophomore Tommy Holmes and the fourth line of Kennish, Marco Ferrari and Stuart Swenson--the exhibition of good hockey fundamental rapidly ceased. Harvard was very lucky that it possessed the on paper strength to win this game on sheer talent alone.

Home-ice victims RPI and Brown weren't so lucky. They played badly and couldn't come back, and they'll have to get to Lake Placid the hard way--win two must-win games in a row.

It's a tribute to Harvard's ability that it got this win in spite of itself. But for my stomach's sake, guys, please get the Red out and advance to the ECAC Semis like the cakewalk that these games ought to be.