Red Raiders at Lynah

Colgate may be known as a not-so-great road team, but don't tell that to the Red Raiders. Last night in Cornell's Lynah Rink--the site of many an ECAC team's nightmare--the league-leading Raiders rolled by home-favorite Cornell for an easy 7-4 win. The Lynah loss ended a sevengame winning streak for the Big Red.

With the win, Colgate solidified its two-month-long hold on the ECAC lead. The Red Raiders have an 11-1-1 league mark (16-3-1 overall), putting them a whopping six points ahead of the second place-Crimson (8-5-1 ECAC, 8-7-1 overall), despite having played less league games than Harvard.

A win would have put the streaking Big Red (7-4-2 ECAC, 9-6-2 overall) one point ahead of the Crimson in the league standings. Cornell led, 3-1, midway through the second, but surrendered a 5-3 lead to Colgate by the end of that same period and never recovered.

On the Billboard Charts: The Crimson, which made a brief appearance at number 10 in the NCAA poll last week, has dropped into a 13th-place tie with Northeastern in this week's edition. In the other national poll, published by the Albany Times-Union, Harvard continues to receive votes, but remains several points shy of the standings.

The top two spots in both polls are held by the Crimson's two NCAA Final Four opponents from last season--Michigan State (1st with a 23-4-2 record) and Minnesota (2nd, 18-7-2).

Colgate continues to be the ECAC's top representative with the number-three spot in the NCAA poll. Clarkson (14-5-1) is tied with Maine (18-7-3) in eighth place.

A Good Catholic Boy: Two weeks ago, senior Ted Donato--who broke his collarbone in mid-November--was finally given the okay to get back on the ice. But with Harvard's examperiod ban on organized practices, the forward didn't have any teammates to join him.

So Donato, a 1986 graduate of local hockey powerhouse Catholic Memorial (also the alma mater of Crimson goaltender Chuckie Hughes), has been skating with his old high school club.

The senior expects to be back in the lineup for Harvard's next matchup, a Feb. 2 contest at Princeton. The team, meanwhile, will start up organized practices--for those players who have finished exams--on Thursday night. Full-team practices resume on Saturday.

Sorry, Murph: In last week's notebook, I (erroneously) pointed out Harvard was dominating the ECAC scoring leaders list by claiming five of the top 10 spots.

Wrong.

Harvard had not five, but six of the leading point producers in the league. Overlooked was senior John Murphy, who's six goals and 17 assists (23 points) put him in fifth place, just behind teammate John Weisbrod

As a weak apology, however, I must say that it's been tough to keep up with Murphy's stats this month. In just two weekends of action, the senior has doubled his overall point total--he had 12 points heading into Christmas break and is now the number-four scorer on the team with 24.

Most of that surge came Yale-Brown weekend, when Murphy led the team with an unheralded eightperformance.

Beanpot Tix: Tickets for this year's Beanpot tournament, which will be held Feb. 5 and 12 at Boston Garden, go on sale today at 9 a.m. at the Harvard ticket office in the basement of Harvard Hall.