WHALE OF A COMEBACK: M. Hockey Scores Six Unanswered Goals to Top Yale

NEW HAVEN, Conn.—Welcome back, guys. It’s been a long, cold, unfulfilling winter without you.

If the Harvard men’s hockey team goes on to accomplish what the preseason pundits thought it would—win the ECAC tournament and earn a third straight NCAA tournament berth—the revival witnessed in New Haven on Friday night will surely be looked upon as the turning point.

The Crimson trailed archrival Yale (11-11-0, 9-6-0 ECAC) by four goals (4-0) after one period and three (5-2) after two, but staged a serendipitous rally in the third, scoring five times—including goals from Tyler Kolarik, Tim Pettit and the winner by Noah Welch in a 61-second span—to deliver a potentially luck-changing, season-making 7-5 win before a dumbfounded sellout of 3,486 at Ingalls Rink and national television audience on CSTV.

“Pretty unbelievable feat,” marveled Harvard junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris.

Unbelievable, as well as badly, badly needed. The Crimson had lost four of its last five, and appeared headed to new depths when four goals in seven minutes chased starting goaltender John Daigneau (10 saves on 14 shots) in favor of Grumet-Morris after one period. Harvard seemed, by all indications, to be in just-get-us-outta-here mode.

“I certainly was,” Kolarik said. “I’m not going to lie to you.”

But the Crimson outscored Yale in the second period, 2-1, and its effort grew into a crescendo during the final stanza as Harvard assembled the biggest third-period comeback of the Mark Mazzoleni era. The Crimson put a season-high 58 shots on goal, the most since it had 68 against Brown in the 2002 ECAC playoffs—and that game lasted two overtimes.

Twenty-eight of those shots came in the third period alone. To put that number in perspective, the Crimson has had fewer than 28 shots on goal in nine games this season, including 20 in last Monday’s forgettable Beanpot loss to Boston College that prompted widespread water-cooler ribbing of Harvard alums across Greater Boston.

Now, though, that’s ancient history. The Crimson stands 9-11-2 (7-8-1 ECAC) and is four points out of the final first-round bye in the ECAC tournament with six league games to play.

Maybe there really is something to that darkest-before-the-light stuff.

“This is the type of game that can push a team over the hump,” said Harvard captain Kenny Smith. “Hopefully this will be it for us.”

Smith, who began Friday’s game with a team-low minus-9 rating, started the surge. He was on the ice for three of Yale’s first-period goals, but made what Welch called “the play of the game” at 7:48 of the second. Smith gained possession at neutral ice, went into the Bulldog zone on a 1-on-2, and split the defenders with a snap shot from between the circles that eluded goaltender Josh Gartner. “That,” Welch said, “is why he’s our captain.”

“He inspired our team and really took charge out there,” Mazzoleni said of Smith. “He made a great shot. Kenny can really snap the puck. He has as hard a shot on the snap shot as anyone on the team.”

Smith’s goal, his second of the season, cut the Yale lead to 4-1 and, most importantly, gave his team something to rally around. Even after Nathan Murphy scored about six minutes later to restore the Bulldogs’ four-goal lead, the Crimson never slowed. Harvard outshot the Elis in the period, 19-5, and drew the deficit back to three (5-2) when Brendan Bernakevitch struck from between the circles at 17:03.

And in the third period, Harvard’s stars awoke from their respective dormancies, one by one, to complete the improbable comeback.

The first to shake off his slump was senior winger Dennis Packard. Packard, who had eight points after seven games this season but had recorded only four more entering Friday, scored the type of goal his team needs him to score: he used his 6’5, 215-pound frame to muscle his way in front and take two whacks at the net, before sending his third try into the twine.

Packard’s goal made it a two-goal game four minutes into the third. A comeback, though still unlikely, suddenly seemed plausible.

The Crimson was then given a perfect opportunity to cut into the deficit, if not tie the game, when its hustle drew successive penalties on Nate Jackson and Mike Grobe. That gave Harvard 3:03 of continuous power play time, including 57 seconds with a two-man advantage. But while the Crimson put seven shots on goal during the two power plays—including two point-blank chances by Kevin Du on a 2-on-1—none resulted in a goal. And three minutes later, when struggling stars Pettit and Kolarik were denied on a 2-on-1, it looked as if Harvard’s efforts would go for naught. Again.

But the Crimson persisted, and its third-period shooting gallery eventually overwhelmed Gartner. Harvard scored three goals—including the game-tying goal and game-winning goal—in a little over one minute.

On the 50th shot, a rebound of Tom Walsh’s point wrister, Kolarik snapped his nine-game goal-scoring drought and cut Yale’s lead to 5-4 with 7:24 left. “It’s been about a month and a half between goals,” said Kolarik, who last scored on Dec. 13 against Massachusetts. “When you catch a break and one pops like that, it’s a good feeling.”

On the 53rd shot, a re-direct of Smith’s wrister from just inside the blue line, Pettit tied it. The goal—Pettit’s seventh of the season, after scoring 17 last year—silenced the once-exuberant crowd building with a tangible sense of dread.

The foreboding lasted 31 seconds, until the 56th shot, when Welch, who called Friday’s first period “the all-time low in my hockey career,” roofed the uncovered rebound of Rob Fried’s shot from the doorstep. Harvard was ahead to stay.

“The last couple of games hadn’t been going as well for me, and my confidence was down,” said Welch, a second-team All-America last season who hadn’t scored since Dec. 27. “That was a huge goal for me.”

“I’m real proud of Noah,” Kolarik said. “He’s been down on himself more than he should. He’s his own worst critic. But he showed a lot of character by playing the kind of game he did in the second and third.

“That’s the All-American. That’s the guy we want on the ice all the time.”

The comeback was complete, and it was no accident that the big goals came from Harvard’s big players. The Crimson is 5-0-0 when Kolarik scores a goal.

“There aren’t too many teams that have very successful seasons if their top players aren’t successful,” Mazzoleni said. “They get the prime ice time, and they get the opportunities.”

Bernakevitch added an empty-netter with 1:08 remaining to seal an emotional victory that was a long time coming for Harvard, which began the season as the nation’s sixth-ranked team but had won only four of its previous 14 games.

“We faced a tremendous amount of adversity, and we had to meet that challenge if we were going to turn this thing around,” Mazzoleni said. “A lesser person, a lesser team would’ve folded.”

—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.