Crimson Fails to Maintain Pressure In Triple-OT Loss

With a win on Saturday night, the Harvard men’s lacrosse team (6-6, 3-3 Ivy) would have put itself in good standing for a playoff spot, somewhere it had not been since 1996.

A third-overtime goal by Dartmouth (7-7, 3-3) largely terminated that hope. But despite finishing off the Crimson by a score of 14-13 at Jordan Field, the Big Green didn’t keep Harvard out of the playoffs.

Late last night, the Crimson received an invitation to the NCAA Tournament. It will play Syracuse in the First Round on May 14.

It was a bit of a surprise after Saturday’s game, in which the outcome appeared to be far more devastating than the Crimson’s previous triple-OT game, a win against Denver a month ago.

After the last goal of regulation on Saturday with 2:22 remaining, the match went 11:38 without a score until Big Green freshman Brian Koch put the game away with 1:16 gone in the third overtime.

In those periods, Harvard appeared to take control for the first time since the opening minutes. Junior John Henry Flood won the face-off at the beginning of each overtime to give his team the opportunity to strike before Dartmouth had the chance.

“Over the course of the overtime we had possession probably two-thirds or three-quarters of the time, because John Henry was doing such a good job on the face-offs,” Crimson coach Scott Anderson said. “We won almost every face-off. It was unbelievable. He only lost a couple in the game.”

Ironically, Flood was unable to control the face-off for a third straight time to open the final extra period and the Dartmouth clincher came straight thereafter.

But it was thanks to Flood that Harvard did not lack chances to put the game away.

Due to the discrepancy in time of possession, the Crimson took seven shots to the Big Green’s three in the first two overtimes as it looked that the cards would fall Harvard’s way.

“Their goal was just sort of a fluky goal right at the end,” Anderson said. “But if you give someone enough opportunities, sooner or later somebody’s going to score. I felt like it should’ve been us.”

That was the story throughout the game.

The Crimson took more than double the number of shots that Dartmouth did, 73-36, but when it came down to it, Dartmouth took the smarter shots.

After Harvard came out strong, scoring twice in the first 1:31 on an unassisted goal from junior Greg Cohen and a senior-to-senior score from Tom Boylan to Sean Kane, the drought began.

Although the squad took fourteen shots in the first quarter, it failed to score a third time and allowed five Big Green goals on just eight shots to end the quarter down 5-2.

“Things were coming pretty easily right there,” Kane said. “[But] they’re a very opportunistic team and they capitalized on a lot of mistakes of ours.”

In the second frame, the Crimson fared little better as it gave up four goals on eight shots. But Flood kept the team in the game by continuing to gain possessions.

But it was not enough to keep the Big Green from scoring twice in the final 1:15, putting it up 9-5 going into the break.

“I thought in the first half the offense went a little flat, but defensively I was actually surprised we weren’t doing a better job,” Anderson said. “I thought, if anything, that we could count on.”

Halftime changed things around.

After the break, the Crimson rattled off three straight goals in the first six minutes.Harvard took the lead in the scoring battle in the period, notching five goals to the Big Green’s three to send the game into the final 15 with a 12-10 deficit.

“We fought our way back in the third quarter,” Kane said. “It was a big quarter, we came out hard, and in the fourth quarter we did it again.”

The fourth was the least eventful period as the Crimson outscored Dartmouth just 3-1. But the two-goal difference was enough to send the game into extra minutes.

It took over five-and-a-half minutes before the final score came, but Calvert’s goal with 2:22 remaining, his 26th of the season, was the last of regulation, deadlocking the game in a 13-13 tie that was not broken until that third overtime.

Cohen, Calvert, and Kane all had hat-tricks on the night, and Calvert added an assist to lead his team with four points.

With the loss the Crimson ended the regular reason on a two-game losing streak and three losses in a row at home.

“We thought we had them from the start,” Kane said. “To go out like that, on a broken play, it’s kind of been the story of the season. We’ve outplayed teams and they’ve seemed to find ways [to beat us].”

—Staff writer Madeleine I. Shapiro can be reached at mshapiro@fas.harvard.edu.