Half-Minute Men: Grumet-Morris Again Brilliant in Net

BOSTON—Everybody’s allowed a mistake once in a while, right?

Lucky for Harvard netminder Dov Grumet-Morris, the gift of a goal he allowed with 5.7 seconds remaining in the first period didn’t decide last night’s game.

“It happens,” the goaltender said of his lone tally allowed, “and it turned out not to win the game for them.”

“That’s always nice,” he added with a smile, “especially since it was a bad goal on my part.”

With the Crimson 3:45 through a five-minute penalty kill, Grumet-Morris looked away for the briefest of moments and allowed a shot by Terriers blueliner Sean Sullivan to ricochet off the back of his skate and into the goal.

“I was trying to cheat and check the slot for a one-timer because there was such little time left,” Grumet-Morris explained. “He threw it, got a lucky bounce, and it went in.”

And that one play might very well have turned the tide for No. 10 BU, which took a 1-0 lead into the locker room after controlling much of the first 20 minutes of play.

Harvard, despite having impressively killed off a great chunk of forward Charlie Johnson’s five-minute major for hitting from behind, was now in a hole.

That hole might have loomed much larger, though.

There was luck—and the ping of the post—which kept Chris Borque’s uncontested shot out of the Crimson goal.

And then there was the stellar play of Grumet-Morris, whose 10 first-period saves featured several spectacular moves.

“We have a lot of confidence in Dov, who’s our best penalty killer,” said captain Noah Welch.

And though Sullivan’s goal was “soft”—Welch’s words—Grumet-Morris had indeed kept Harvard in the hunt.

Only a week before, the Crimson had fallen behind then-No. 1 Boston College just 62 seconds into the game—only to come back and win the contest 3-1.

A one-goal deficit was not utterly daunting, though a multiple-goal hole might have been.

When asked to pinpoint a turning point in the game, BU coach Jack Parker admitted: “The fact, maybe, that we didn’t score a few early on when we had real good chances and good time in their zone.”

Grumet-Morris finished the night with 30 saves, adding 11 in the second and nine in the final frame.

Seven games into the season, he boasts a .923 save percentage, and besides a wild, 8-6 win over Princeton, the senior has allowed an average of just 1.67 goals per game.

“It’s hard to start any conversation [about] any of our wins when you don’t talk about Dov Grumet-Morris,” said Crimson coach Ted Donato ’91, “because he’s been stellar for us all year.

“It’s nice and reassuring for a coach to know that you’re going to get a great effort in the net.”

And save one brief instant late in the first period last night, Grumet-Morris was unforgiving. He smothered every shot that sailed through the air, and he guarded the crease unflinchingly with his pads, oftentimes blocking several stabbing attempts within a matter of seconds but never taking his eyes off the puck.

“I thought their goalie played very well,” Parker said of the effort, “hence the low-scoring game.

“You’re not going to win with one goal.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.