Cornell Shoots Down M. Hockey in ECAC Finals

ALBANY, N.Y.—After four hours and four minutes of ECAC tournament semifinal hockey against Colgate on Friday, and after one period of Saturday’s final against Cornell, the No. 8 Harvard men’s hockey team finally ran out of gas.

Up 1-0 after a gritty first-frame effort, the Crimson (21-9-3, 15-5-2) surrendered two second-period goals in quick succession, giving the Big Red (26-4-3, 18-2-2) a lead it would hold until the clock wound down, the buzzer sounded, and the Whitelaw Trophy was wheeled out onto the ice.

“Do I think we played our best game? Not by a long shot,” said Harvard coach Ted Donato ’91 of his squad’s 3-1 loss. “But ultimately, you have to give Cornell a lot of credit. We were outplayed, [and] I think they deserved to win.”

Dylan Reese’s screened slapshot at 18:23 in the initial period gave the Crimson a first-frame lead, and Harvard enjoyed several good chances when Cornell’s Daniel Pegoraro was whistled for holding 7:21 into the middle period—the best of which came when Dan Murphy dished the puck from the right circle to the left corner of the crease, where a perfectly positioned Brendan Bernakevitch pushed it just wide.

“We were carrying the play,” Donato said. “We had some good puck control, some good chances on that power play.”

But there would be no reward for two dominating minutes of the man-advantage, and just as Pegoraro’s minor expired, Cornell’s Paul Varteressian blocked a Noah Welch blueline shot, sending the puck rolling towards the penalty box and the newly liberated Pegoraro.

“Pegoraro just jumped out of the box and picked it up,” Varteressian explained. “I was kind of out of gas, but [there are] not too many opportunities to take a two-on-one against a team like Harvard, so I jumped in there and just went as hard to the net as possible.”

Pegoraro carried the puck up the right side, hesitating at the blueline as Varteressian sprinted to make up ground. Welch, who believed a backchecking teammate would cover Varteressian, stayed with Pegoraro. Welch was wrong, though, and Pegoraro slipped the puck over to the slot, where a wide-open Varteressian one-timed a shot that trickled past Crimson netminder Dov Grumet-Morris at 9:35.

“I thought our backchecker was there, and I thought I actually turned it into a one-on-one,” Welch said. “I gave [Pegoraro] the pass across, which is not my job. I should let Dov take the shooter, so I take responsibility for that goal.”

“Dov almost had it,” Welch added. “He almost made a great save, but I can’t let the pass go by.”

The game was tied, and the Pepsi Arena, filled with a sea of the Cornell faithful, came to life.

“Their first goal killed us,” Donato said. “We were on the verge of getting a two-goal lead, the guy comes out of the box, and they end up with a two-on-one. It was a big momentum boost. From that point forward, they really took the play to us for the rest of the game.”

Just 27 seconds after the inauspicious goal, Crimson freshman Tyler Magura was called for hooking, giving the Big Red a power play of its own—a dangerous gift for a squad that boasted a 24.7 percent conversion rate entering the game.

And less than half a minute into the man-advantage, Cornell assistant captain Charlie Cook launched a blueline screamer at 10:30 that beat a screened Grumet-Morris top-shelf.

In the space of 55 seconds, the Big Red had taken a slim lead and a sizeable momentum advantage.

The Crimson mustered only two shots on goal in that middle frame, while Cornell took 14, the majority of which came from around the crease and close in the circles.

The Big Red outshot Harvard 32-18 on the night, and Cook would notch another power-play, screened, blueline-slapshot goal 6:35 into the third period to ice the 3-1 victory.

The Crimson appeared to lack the legs necessary to surmount the two-goal deficit, one which loomed all the larger against a physical Cornell squad that was granting few handouts.

“They get that lead on you,” Donato said, “[and] it’s awfully tough to do much with it.”

It might have appeared somewhat less impossible, of course, had Friday night’s semifinal not lasted nearly 100 minutes, ending only when Kevin Du netted a breakaway goal 16:01 into the second full overtime.

When Big Red coach Mike Schafer addressed the media on Friday, his team had just clinched a spot in the finals and the puck was just about to drop on the Colgate-Harvard semifinal.

“The only thing I’m hoping for,” Schafer joked when asked which team he would rather face Saturday, “is a five- or six-overtime game that goes until 4 a.m.”

In fact, the Crimson beat the Raiders at 11:42 p.m., and “in all honesty,” Donato said after Saturday’s loss, “maybe our speed was not where we wanted it to be because of [Friday’s] late-night game.”

“I don’t think we really felt comfortable really attacking on the forecheck as much as we would probably have liked,” he said, though he added, “Cornell had a lot to do with that.”

And so the Big Red and Harvard continued their nearly annual exchange of the Whitelaw Trophy—Harvard took the championship game from the Big Red is 2002, while Cornell returned the favor in 2003. The Crimson won the championship from Clarkson last season, and this year, the Whitelaw will travel back to Ithaca, N.Y.

Said Donato, simply, “We were outplayed. I think they deserved to win.”

“Sometimes, at the end of the game,” he added, “you’ve just got to take your hat off and say, ‘Hey, we got outplayed,’ and I think that was the case tonight.”

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