Men's Hockey Topples No. 1 Quinnipiac in OT

The No. 1 Quinnipiac men’s hockey had not lost a single away game (10-0-2) all year. The Bobcats (24-5-5, 17-2-3 ECAC) were undefeated in 18 games after leading after two periods (16-0-2) and had not dropped an ECAC contest since October.

That all changed off a tip from Alex Fallstrom.

The senior forward’s overtime goal with 18.6 seconds left in the extra frame lifted Harvard to a 2-1 upset at the Bright Hockey Center Friday evening. In its penultimate game of the season, the last-place Crimson (9-17-3, 6-14-2 ECAC) found a way to knock off a top-ranked team for the first time since 2004.

“We’ve been facing a lot of adversity. We haven’t been winning as much as we’d like [with] a lot of injuries,” Fallstrom said. “But the one thing that’s really cool is that we never stop believing in ourselves. We just kept working, came down to the rink every day, battling, and today that pays off, so it feels really good.”

With less than 30 seconds left in overtime, it appeared that Harvard would leave the ice with a moral victory. For the Crimson, which entered the game poised to become the first squad in program history to finish at the bottom of the ECAC, a 1-1 tie against the No. 1 team in the county wouldn’t have been too shabby.

But Greg Gozzo had other plans. The freshman forward forced a turnover at the Quinnipiac blueline knocking the puck onto the stick of classmate Jimmy Vesey. With just under 20 ticks left, Vesey connected with Fallstrom on a tape-to-tape, backdoor feed for the game winner.

“Vesey made a beautiful pass to Fallstrom, and I think the unsung hero there was Gozzo,” Harvard coach Ted Donato ’91 said. “Our guys, they battled to the last second, and I’m happy for the guys because we’ve worked real hard. We’ve been close to making some plays at key times in the game, and tonight we were able to make them.”

After a scoreless opening frame, Bobcat senior foreward Ben Arnt emerged from a scramble in front of the net to push a rebound past junior Harvard goaltender Raphael Girard with just over five minutes left in the second period. Quinnipiac continued to challenge Girard, who finished the night with 33 saves, in the final minutes of the second frame but settled for a 1-0 lead after 40 minutes.

The tide turned in the third period as the Crimson outshot the Bobcats, 12-5, in the final frame of regulation. Quinnipiac had outshot Harvard, 26-18, in the first two frames.

Less than six minutes into the third, senior forward Marshall Everson found freshman forward Kyle Criscuolo open along the left wing. The freshman forward threatened a cross-ice pass to classmate Brian Hart before launching a wrister from within the faceoff circle. The shot sailed past the glove Quinnipiac goaltender Eric Hartzell (33 saves) for Criscuolo’s sixth of the season and third in the last two games.

“I knew that [Hartzell] would be thinking I might pass it, so I pulled the puck back, made sure that he knew that I would have the opportunity to pass it if I wanted to, and went short-side,” Criscuolo said.

The final minutes saw close calls on both sides. Hartzell poke-checked away a point-blank attempt by Criscuolo midway through the third. In overtime, Girard was forced to make a couple of close leg saves to keep the Crimson in the game. Fallstrom provided the highlight of the night with his seventh goal of the season.

Quinnipiac entered Saturday’s game with a 12-point lead in the ECAC standings and a first-place conference tournament seed locked up. But Bobcats coach Rand Pecknold felt that his team’s comfortable position in the rankings did not affect its play.

“Our guys, they played hard tonight,” Pecknold said. “I don’t think it’s a motivational thing; I think our guys competed their tails off tonight. We just didn’t play smart. We made a lot of small, little mistakes, and we’ve got to clean up some errors.”

The Crimson had last defeated a team ranked No.1 in a 3-1 home win over Boston College on Nov. 17, 2004. Quinnipiac’s last in-conference loss was a 5-1 defeat to Colgate on Oct. 27 at a neutral rink in Hyannis, Mass.

After an eight-game losing streak consumed most of January and the beginning of February, the Crimson has posted a 4-1-2 record in its last seven games. Harvard’s chronically depleted roster has recently shown flashes of the squad that made a run to last year’s ECAC final, gaining strength and confidence along the way.

“After the BU game, the seniors really stepped up, and I think they’ve really been leading the way as of late,” Criscuolo said. “It continues to boost our confidence going into the playoffs.”

“You could argue that there wasn’t a lot to gain from the standings perspective, but I think there is a lot of pride in our locker room,” Donato added.

The overtime win allowed the Crimson to draw within a point of 11-th place Colgate.

—Staff writer Michael D. Ledecky can be reached at mledecky@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @mdledecky.