M. Hockey Stumbles Out of Long Break

You only had to catch the 38th and 39th minutes of Friday night’s scuffle between the No. 12 Harvard men’s hockey team and No. 13 Colgate to understand what kind of night it really was.

At 17:44 in the second period, you’d have seen Crimson forward Dave Watters whistled for hitting-from-behind, one of a slew of costly Harvard penalties.

Thirty-two seconds later, you’d have watched the Raiders knock home a puck that bounced high off Crimson blueliner Dylan Reese and right into Colgate hands, one of a slew of unlucky Harvard caroms.

And just moments after that, you’d have witnessed assistant captain Ryan Lannon shattering his stick on the goalframe, disgusted by the eventual game-winning goal.

It was just that kind of night.

“I think we kind of left the game up to chance,” said captain Noah Welch of the 3-1 loss, his team’s first home defeat all season.

“Tonight,” he added, “we just kind of were hoping for a good bounce, hoping for a late goal, and you can’t win games like that.”

The Crimson (9-5-2, 6-4-1 ECAC) actually took the Bright Center ice with an early edge, dominating the first five minutes of play. Outshooting the Raiders (14-5-0, 6-1-0) by an 8-2 count in those early moments, Harvard seemed determined to atone for its abysmal pre-Christmas showing in the Dodge Holiday Classic.

But then, suddenly, Colgate turned it on—or the Crimson turned it off—and that, as they say, was the ballgame.

In the remaining 15 minutes of the first period, the Raiders outshot Harvard 12-0. The Crimson was whistled for five penalties during that time. Moreover, on two man-advantages, Harvard could barely push the puck past its own blueline, much less muster any sort of attack.

All in all, the squad went 1-for-6 on its power play—one that had heretofore been a strength.

“The unit I’m on was horrible,” Welch said of the team’s top quintet. “We didn’t have, really, any chances.”

“It was us,” he added, responding to a question regarding Colgate’s penalty kill. “Every team plays, pretty much, a similar [penalty kill] in the neutral zone and in the [defensive] zone, so it was definitely us. It really didn’t have that much to do with them.

“I don’t know—I don’t think guys wanted the puck tonight, weren’t supporting each other.”

And that one man-advantage tally that put the Crimson on the board? It came from Harvard’s second unit. At 5:27 into the final frame, sophomore Ryan Maki—quiet for much of the season and occasionally hobbled by injury—netted a pretty feed from junior Dan Murphy, who hovered behind the left side of the goalmouth, to bring the Crimson within a goal.

It was the lone bright spot for a Harvard squad that managed only 16 shots in the first two periods—eight of which, of course, came in the first five minutes of play.

But this late, small burst of energy was spearheaded, in large part, by Murphy’s tenacious play.

The forward produced similar passes in the later minutes, but every time—as was the case for the entire night—the intended Crimson recipient was a step behind, a second too late, a foot off the mark.

“We didn’t do a good job making them play in their own zone,” said Harvard coach Ted Donato ’91 of a Raiders squad that has now taken six of its last seven games. “They’re a good offensive team, and they like to play up-tempo, but we didn’t make them stop and play defense in their own zone much.”

Donato echoed, almost exactly, the sentiments of his coaching counterpart across the ice, Don Vaughan.

“We wanted to play an up-tempo game, and I think we did that,” the Colgate coach said. “We were able to match their speed.”

And while that Crimson speed appeared just a step behind, perhaps rusty after a 15-day layoff, the Raiders drew more than enough inspiration from its embarrassing, 5-1 loss to the Northeastern Huskies just the weekend before.

“We still had the Northeastern game in our mind all week in practice, and we knew we wanted to get beyond that,” Vaughan said, “and I think coming in here and playing Harvard was exactly the motivator that we needed.”

The Crimson would not strike again despite a string of close calls in the third period—a close-range rebound missed by senior Brendan Bernakevitch, a pair of wide-right slapshots by freshman Mike Taylor, a blistering offering from Welch that was denied and a frustratingly close chance by sophomore Dylan Reese with less than a minute remaining.

“But for a couple that just went wide, we might still be out there,” Vaughan said.

Meanwhile, Colgate managed to beat Harvard goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris three times, the result of a couple fortuitous bounces and a whole lot of hustle.

“They just parked themselves in front of the net and tried to stay there,” Grumet-Morris said, “and that’s what good offensive teams do.”

And what the Crimson did not Friday night.

Said Donato, “We knew coming in that we couldn’t have anything but our best to come away with a victory.”

And though the coach allowed that “it’s easy to look for excuses,” he concluded that “in my mind, we did too many things poorly to rely on excuses.”

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