Tripped Up in North Country

For a while this weekend, it looked as if the Harvard men’s hockey team’s Thanksgiving trek into North Country might go entirely unrewarded. After a crushing 4-2 collapse at the hands of St. Lawrence, the Crimson (5-3-1, 3-3-1 ECAC) again collapsed, this time against Clarkson, before rallying for a 3-2 win.

Still, said captain Noah Welch before his team prepared for the long journey back to Cambridge, “I’m pissed at this road trip.”

Though the Crimson salvaged a split, the team struggled to hold its leads and came away with two points on the weekend in which, as every player knew, the Crimson could have had four.

HARVARD 3, CLARKSON 2

POTSDAM, N.Y.—For a moment on Saturday night in the Golden Knights’ Cheel Arena, it looked like déjà vu all over again. For the second night in a row, the Crimson had watched its 2-0 advantage dissolve into a 2-2 tie.

“We score two goals,” said Harvard coach Ted Donato ’91, “and we kind of sit back a little bit instead of carrying the play.”

Still motivated by the previous night’s utter breakdown, though, the Crimson regrouped and regained the lead with a pair of brilliant moves.

With a bit over 12 minutes remaining in the third period, freshman Mike Taylor battled for the puck along the right side of the ice.

Taylor’s hustle paid dividends, and he slipped the puck back towards Harvard assistant captain Tom Cavanagh, who in turn flipped it past Golden Knights goalie Dustin Traylen with a graceful deke.

“It was a great play by [Taylor],” said Crimson captain Noah Welch, who scored his team’s second goal with a top-shelf, power-play blast. “And that’s what we needed.”

After Saturday’s first period, it didn’t seem as if Harvard would need that third goal. The Crimson jumped out strong, much stronger than the previous night, skating an aggressive game and utilizing a strong forecheck.

“After last night, I don’t think our club needed any incentive to get up,” Donato said, “and I thought we came out, carried the play.”

And holding the fort on the other end of the ice was sophomore goaltender Justin Tobe, who saw his first minutes in a Harvard sweater against Clarkson (3-9-1, 1-5-1).

Tobe was focused in net and handled the puck cleanly, amassing 27 saves for the victory.

“He was unbelievable,” Welch said. “He made some big stops.”

The netminder’s performance, combined with a 5-on-3 rebound goal by Charlie Johnson and Welch’s tally, gave the Crimson a two-goal advantage entering the final frame.

But 1:44 in, the Golden Knights’ Steve Zalewski redirected a low puck past Tobe.

Only 31 seconds later, as Clarkson’s airhorn sounded and the announcer credited the appropriate players, Clarkson struck again, this time when a shot by Michael Grenzy seemed to deflect off of Harvard blueliner Ryan Lannon.

“I didn’t think their goals were necessarily dangerous situations until they went in the net,” Donato said. “But I give them credit. They really worked.”

The Golden Knights outshot the Crimson 20-11 in the first two periods—Harvard had managed only three shots in the second frame—and did, indeed, hold a 29-18 advantage when the final buzzer sounded.

And it was partly Clarkson’s persistence that helped the Crimson fritter away its second straight two-goal lead.

“It was kind of a bittersweet win,” Welch admitted, noting that “guys in [the locker room] aren’t jumping around. We gave up a two-goal lead, and good teams don’t do that.”

Still, Harvard managed to pull through the second time around.

“Tonight was huge,” Welch said. “We came together. We were focused, and we just wanted to keep it simple. I think on the road, the little things like having good stick position and stops and starts and just making safe plays is what gets wins, and we kind of stuck to that early and had some success.”

ST. LAWRENCE 4, HARVARD 2

CANTON, N.Y.—As the Crimson exited Appleton Arena Friday night, there was simply no explaining away its bruising, 4-2 defeat at the hands of the Saints (7-7-1, 3-4-0).

“I think excuses, in general, are for losers,” Donato said. “Certainly, the travel and the holiday and all that stuff is all well and good, but last I checked there was also a Thanksgiving in St. Lawrence. We have no excuses.”

Rather, Harvard simply played a step behind from the very start.

The Saints dominated early, taking a slew of quick shots and corralling the puck in the Crimson’s end with ease.

“The first seven or eight minutes,” Donato said, “we were really back on our heels and they were taking play to us.”

Yet the St. Lawrence advantage did not appear on the scoreboard. Instead, it was Harvard that entered the first intermission with a 2-0 advantage, the result of a close-range rebound knocked in by assistant captain Tom Cavanagh and a deflected, power-play slapshot by captain Noah Welch exactly five minutes later.

“We got lucky the first period,” Welch said. “They could have been up 4-0 the first 10 minutes of the game.”

With 20 minutes gone, though, the Crimson held the advantage—however undeserved—and it was the team’s to lose.

And the team did just that. If Harvard had gained any momentum from its fortuitous lead, that quickly dissolved with a series of second-period penalties.

In less than 75 seconds, the Crimson sent three skaters to the sin bin—assistant captain Ryan Lannon for tripping, senior Rob Flynn for a bench minor and Welch for cross-checking.

Shortly thereafter, St. Lawrence’s T.J. Trevelyan scored, the first goal Grumet-Morris had allowed in his last 65:14 of play.

And it was this “rash of penalties” according to Grumet-Morris that did the Crimson in.

“We just couldn’t stop the bleeding,” Donato said.

By the third period, as the Saints saw more and more quality chances against Grumet-Morris, it was clear in which direction the game was headed. “In general, we lost a lot of the 1-on-1 battles,” Donato said. “We lost a lot of races to the puck, and we just didn’t play with the type of intensity and attention to detail that has been our trademark over the last four [wins].”

Finally, 3:17 into the final frame, Saints blueliner Chase Trull picked up a bouncing puck near the left circle and sent it high over Grumet-Morris to tie the game.

Drew Bagnall capped the unanswered comeback at 8:48 when he knocked in a neat cross-ice feed, and Trevelyan knocked home an empty-netter with 0.1 seconds remaining on the clock.

Grumet-Morris returned for the final tenth of a second, and he later surmised that, “in the third period, they just beat us. We lost the third period. We lost the game.”

It was a bitter end to Harvard’s four-game win streak, and it wasn’t a loss soon to be forgotten.

“Losing isn’t disappointing,” Welch said. “It’s the fact that we got outworked 95 percent of that game. We didn’t really show up tonight, so that’s kind of more disappointing than losing.”

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