No. 10 Harvard Men’s Lacrosse Falls to No. 1 Cornell 20-12

On a sunny, warm day in front of the largest crowd ever assembled at Jordan Field, the No. 10 Harvard men’s lacrosse team (9-3, 3-2 Ivy) welcomed the No. 1 Cornell Big Red to Cambridge in a highly-touted matchup between the two top-10 programs. Despite the fanfare of the team’s senior day celebrations and alumni day festivities, the team was unable to complete its upset victory, falling to the powerhouse by a score of 20-12.

Quarterbacked by Tewaaraton Award favorite CJ Kirst, the Cornell squad came out firing on all cylinders, and showed why it deserves to be ranked not only the top team in the Ivy League, but the top team in the nation. In what was the last home game for the Harvard senior class — which is composed of 18 members — the team was unable to protect its home turf against the fast, confident, and slippery Cornell offense.

The Crimson defense held Kirst — who is ranked No. 1 in total points and No. 1 in goal production, sitting just one-goal shy of breaking the career goal record following yesterday’s game — to zero points in the first 24 minutes of play. But once the senior got hot, he stayed hot, scoring three back-to-back goals from entirely different spots on the field in the second quarter.

Quieting Kirst, and turning attention to the senior, left room for Cornell’s high-IQ offense to work off-ball, exploiting the slow rotation on the second slide that resulted from the defense’s jumpiness in sending the quick double-team to lock down the all-around threat. Striking four minutes into play, the Cornell attack took advantage of Harvard’s slow substitution game — which provided the Big Red with numerous opportunities throughout the afternoon as the defense scrambled to cover the mis-match — as Cornell attackman Michael Long sent one squarely past freshman goalie Graham Stevens as the Harvard bench tried to get offensive middie junior Logan Ip off the field.

The next strike fell for Cornell as the shot clock hit zero, with Willem Firth hitting the buzzer-beater as he split a sliding Harvard double at the top of the fan. Going berserk, the Cornell bench cheered as Firth stared down the baffled white jerseys. A minute later Cornell had cause to cheer as Ryan Goldstein made light work of junior SSDM Owen Guest, beating the Brunswick School product on a crafty right-to-left split dodge behind the crease before burying it home with no angle along goal-line-extended. While Harvard certainly relies on the strength of its shorty-matchups, against a team like Cornell the slide — or lack thereof — came too late.

Firth and Goldstein would each add one more tally during the first, both on feeds from attackman Andrew Dalton, to race ahead to a commanding 5-0 lead. Looking flustered and uneasy on the defensive end, the Harvard team allowed its nerves to get the best of it as it failed to rely on the fundamentals that have served it so well this season.

“We just didn’t have enough possessions,” said Harvard Head Coach Gerry Byrne. “Whatever skill you have offensively, you tend to settle and not take the great shot. When you don’t have the ball a lot you can get a little impatient and I think we got a little impatient offensively.”

Providing the much-needed answer was sophomore attackman Jack Speidell, who notched the only Crimson goal in the first 15 minutes of play on a feed from senior attackman Sam King. Ending the first quarter down by four, Harvard re-grouped at the break and narrowed Cornell’s lead to just two with goals from junior middies Ip and Andrew Perry at the 14 and 13-minute marks, respectively.

For every hard-earned Crimson possession and success, the Cornell offense seemed to have a quick reply, and less than five seconds after Perry’s snipe, Big Red FOGO Jack Cascadden — who helped Cornell go over 70 percent at the X — took it himself and sailed one past Stevens. Not sending a body to pick up the FOGO, the goal was a too-easy reply to Harvard’s pair of goals. Two minutes later, the squads traded goals, the first coming from junior middie John Aurandt IV. Aurandt took advantage of a late slide from the Cornell defense, dipping around a Big Red LSM and getting a shot off in the fan before snagging his own rebound and burying the second attempt with a cross-hand twister.

Responding to Aurandt was LSM Eddie Rayhill who found himself unmarked in front of the cage on the fast-break off the face off. Whipping it top-shelf, the Harvard defense got caught in the fray on another unsettled play. However, Malone was able to truncate the deficit to two just 20 seconds later on a tic-tac-toe FB, finishing on the one-more look from Speidell.

The next four would fall in favor of Cornell, with middie Brian Luzzi striking at 7:10, and Kirst finishing the next three straight in the span of 40 seconds. Kirst found himself twice guarded by shorties, something that he immediately exploited, letting one rip down the left alley against Finn Jensen with no angle, before taking advantage of a late slide while covered down low by Guest. The third strike for the senior came quickly on the fast break as Kirst found himself unguarded on the right wing — a fatal mistake by the Crimson defense — before sniping it past Stevens while using a sliding senior defenseman Martin Nelson as a screen.

The rest of the second quarter proved to be more back-and-forth play between the two squads, with Harvard notching three goals — one from King, one from Speidell, and one from senior middie Owen Gaffney — and Cornell’s Firth tallying his third on an extra-man opportunity.

The beginning of the third seemed like it was painting a whole new script, as Harvard came out guns blazing following the 10-minute half-time break. With the first three falling in favor of the Crimson — with Malone scoring on a man-up opportunity that carried over from the last 0.2 seconds of the first half, and Aurandt and Ip each tallying their second — it seemed as though Byrne’s guidance at the half had proved the antidote to the Cornell squad’s dominance.

Down by just one, 12-11, with over 11 minutes to play in the third, it seemed like the game would come down to the wire. However, that was not the case as the next eight-straight goals would fall for the Big Red. A lack of offensive possession time resulting from an inability to clamp the ball at the faceoff X would prove the thorn in Harvard’s side as Cornell was able to string together possessions and tire out the Crimson defense.

“We struggled at the face off,” Byrne said. “We were in a time of possession disadvantage and defense gets tired. It’s just the compounding effect of them having way more possessions than we had. So, you get tired and you give up some things. You fail to clear, you don’t escape with the ground ball — all those things compound upon each other.”

Capping off the scoring for the day was Perry, but his valiant effort on the man-up with just under four minutes on the clock proved too little too late, and the Big Red headed home to Ithaca victorious. The win by Cornell has solidified the location of the postseason Ancient Eight tournament, with Head Coach Connor Buczek’s squad claiming the top seed and home field advantage. While the tournament has been previously held on neutral ground at Columbia, this year the Ivy League reverted to granting the top-ranked of the four included teams the title of host.

“I don’t think anything is really going to change for us,” said Byrne about what the squad needs to do to clinch a win against Brown. “This is a really important game for us in our league and for seeding, and you have to take the lessons from this. As I told the team, ‘The score is final, but it’s not fatal.’”

Barring any major upsets this weekend, as Cornell is expected to handily take care of Dartmouth, and Princeton is expected to best Yale — who just lost an always-scrappy rivalry game to UAlbany 15-14 in OT — the Harvard squad will assume the No. 3 seed, which means it will re-match against Princeton in the first round.

Before the postseason action kicks off, however, the teams will need to battle through one final week of league play. The Harvard squad will travel to Providence, R.I. to take on the Brown Bears next weekend, battling for one final regular season game of the spring on Saturday at 5 p.m.. If you can’t make the trek to Providence, catch the action live on ESPN+.

– Staff Writer Katharine A. Forst can be reached at katharine.forst@thecrimson.co