M. Hockey Learns NCAA Fate

The just-announced NCAA Tournament pairings brought a familiar foe into the Harvard men's hockey team's near future. The Crimson, the No. 3 seed in the Northeast Regional at Worcester, will face Boston University on Friday.

BU, as the host school, was guaranteed a spot at Worcester, but Harvard's placement there came as something of a surprise. Most prognosticators had sent the Crimson to Providence to play Maine. Still, the team wasn’t thrown off by the announcement.

"We're a very confident team," captain Dominic Moore said. "Last year we may have had a lot of an underdog mentality. This year, we consider ourselves one of the top teams in the country."

Harvard and the Terriers will be joined in Worcester by top-seeded UNH and fourth-seeded St. Cloud State. It marks the second consecutive year that the Crimson has qualified for the NCAAs and been placed in Worcester.

Harvard and BU have met twice already this season.

The Terriers won 3-0 at Walter Brown Arena in the teams’ first meeting. The second contest was in the FleetCenter on the opening night of the Beanpot. Despite scoring first, Harvard again fell to BU, this time 2-1. The difference between the two contests: defensive pressure.

"I thought we attacked them in the Beanpot game, attacked them consistently," Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni said. "The first time we played BU, we gave them too much space. The second time we went after them."

"That’s definitely the way we've got to play on Friday," he continued. "We've got to go after them."

By now, both teams have had a chance to observe the other's strengths and weaknesses. And though the Terriers have won the last two games, it’s a universal truth in sports that it’s difficult to beat any team three times in a row.

"We're familiar with each other," Moore said. "Harvard-BU, it's always been a strong rivalry."

Sophomore netminder Dov Grumet-Morris also saw the team's comparable styles of play impacting how they match up.

"That's one of the reasons why the games are always close—we're two similar teams," Grumet-Morris said.

Like the Crimson, the Terriers are a quick-skating squad, which will require Harvard—which is coming off a bruising game against a physical Cornell team that employs a slow, half-ice style of play—to make an adjustment.

"I think BU is a big, tenacious team," Mazzoleni said. "BU likes to get in more of a transition game than Cornell."

"We have tremendous respect for BU," he continued. "They've had our number twice this year. I really believe that they're the favorite going into the [Northeast] regional."

Whether the Terriers are indeed the favorite or not—and UNH might having something to say about Mazzoleni's comments—the Crimson seems more comfortable with its position in the NCAA Tournament and more relaxed and confident entering this year's game than it was heading into last year's contest against Maine.

"That's the main difference. It's the underdog mentality versus the confidence we have this year," Moore said. "We came up on the short end of both the BU games, and we're looking forward to having a shot at them again."

—Staff writer Timothy M. McDonald can be reached at tmcdonal@fas.harvard.edu.