Harvard Hockey: Seasons Past and Present

It started out as an attempt to make everyone forget about last year, the season in which the Harvard hockey team didn't make the ECAC playoffs for the first time in 11 seasons.

It ended with everyone attempting to explain what happened this year, the season in which the Harvard hockey team had a losing season for the first time in a dozen winter campaigns.

Some things didn't change. The icemen remained undefeated on television over two years of ECAC Game of the Week appearances with a 7-4 clocking of Brown on January 7. George Hughes won the team scoring title, as he has every year he's been enrolled here, and Billy Cleary still refused to speak to The Crimson.

But many things did change. Harvard lost to Princeton on February 18, 1978 for the first time since February 28, 1967. The icemen had a 4-6 record at Watson Rink and became the first hockey team in history to have Home Ice Disadvantage. Brian Petrovek and his pads were graduated, as Petro donned turtleneck sweaters for games and sat in the press box watching John Hynes and Brian Murphy take his position, not necessarily his place. There was no Billy Hozack on the power play. And there was a fight at the Beanpot...

But maybe the biggest change of the season past was the transformation of the team itself, the team that lost six out of its last seven contests but still managed to "outplay" almost everyone.

Death Scene

It's like my rah-rah, "Go Terriers!" friend from B.U. said to me last Sunday after the Beanpot death scene, "Hey, that wasn't anything resembling the team that almost beat us in December."

And hey, he's right. It also wasn't the team that went to overtime with Number One-ranked Denver over Christmas, that beat playoff-bound Brown twice, that made fools out of the Providence Friars and their empty arena on December 1, that out-freshmanned number eight finisher UNH to a 7-6 win on December 14.

And it wasn't the same team that saluted Jackie Hughes when he won the MVP of the World Arena Tournament in Colorado Springs over the holidays, that embraced Gene Purdy when he played hide and score with Northeastern goalie Ed Arrington for the overtime win in the Beanpot, that raced and checked and connected on passes for three full periods on any given night before exams.

Had the slump come in the first half of the season it would have been easy to explain away. Injuries, and we're talking a plethora, could have bounced the Crimson to the house of underdogs, but it didn't. And though the infirmed squad would suffer setbacks like 11-3 at Boston College and 14-5 against Northeastern, everyone was healthy for the 6-3 loss to Princeton.

The second half did feature the San Quentin schedule thanks to the blizzard, but even though Harvard did play eight games in 15 days, a .500 record over that period did not seem an outrageous request. It turned out to be.

The players complained all year about fan support at the home games and they were more than justified. The people in the odd-number sections at Watson were disgustingly more vocal all season, but then again, even an Ivy League replay of Broncomania might not have pulled the hard-luck Crimson through.

So what was it, why did it happen, how come it's always us, huh?

The problem, my friends, was a lack of goal-scoring.

(Sigh.) It's all so distressingly simple now.