Tourney Cure-All

Peter Chiarelli stood on the sidewalk of a darkened Causeway St. at 1 a.m. yesterday morning and tried to describe how he felt.

He gestured with the can of soda in his right hand and made an effort to say what it was like to be a winner. At first he couldn't think of anything to say.

When he found some words, he kept stopping himself and trying to rephrase his sentiments. Exasperated, he surrendered. His verbal expressions couldn't do justice to his real emotions.

The Harvard hockey captain glanced down, found his left hand and jerked it up. "I know one thing," he said nodding down at the gold trophy he clenched by his side. "I'm not letting go of this all night."

In its third season of outstanding play, the Crimson had found something to take home.

In 1985, Harvard brought home a silver plaque from the Garden and not even that from an NCAA quarterfinal trip to Duluth, Minn.

Last year, the team didn't get so much as a T token at the Garden and brought home only an armful of silver platters from its NCAA championship game against Michigan State in Providence, R.I.

Saturday night, the Crimson went gold.

Cambridge is titletown again.

Harvard had to beat two opponents Saturday night to do it. St. Lawrence, a team that had beaten the Crimson on two of its last three visits to the Hub, and the Boston Garden.

The Garden is small; the free-wheeling Crimson like a more spacious workplace. And the Garden hasn't treated the kids from the wrong side of the river very well since that ECAC Championship back in '83.

For center Allen Bourbeau, the consummate big-ice speedster, the cramped confines might have been too large a handicap. And on top of everything else, the Teaticket native and former Massachusetts Player of the Year had never won a tournament before.

With his team trailing 2-1 at the beginning of the second period, Bourbeau scored to tie and then to give Harvard a lead it would never relinquish. For an encore, he put the best move of the entire tourney on a startled pair of St. Lawrence defensemen and fed teammate C.J. Young at the goalmouth for an easy stuff shot.

A too-good-to-be-true move. A good-enough-to-taste-the-gold move.

The triumph Saturday was not only for the big-name Crimson skaters like Bourbeau, and linemate and tournament MVP Lane MacDonald.

Other less heralded players have fought personal battles to get to this championship. They are perhaps epitomized by defenseman Butch Cutone. The Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 1984, a leg tumor felled the Arlington product his sophomore year.

Last season, Cutone made a courageous comeback from his illness. And this year he has been skating regularly for the squad.

The thing of it is, though, that Cutone doesn't have a single point. Thirty games, twenty-six wins. No goals, no assists, nothing.

"As long as we win, I don't care," Cutone said Saturday night.

A championship cures all.