Roller Coasting

POTSDAM, N.Y.--Just when you thought it might have been safe to jump back on the Harvard Hockey bandwagon....

Nope, sorry. This year's Crimson journey, ostensibly toward Lake Placid, Worcester and Providence, should be officially condemned by the Surgeon General as "hazardous to your health." As in, the ulcer-prone and the faint of heart should get off the bus sooner, rather than later.

The entire ECAC race looks like a roller coaster of Rube Goldberg proportions: on any given night, any given team not only can beat anybody else, but probably will. And you don't have to cite statistics, records, polls or quotations (although I probably will) to realize this stark truth: Harvard could easily finish anywhere from first to seventh or eighth in conference play this year.

And not only is there nothing you or I can do about that, at times it seems as if the Harvard skaters themselves have no control over their own destiny.

"We needed a couple of breaks to topple [Harvard]," St. Lawrence coach Joe Marsh admitted after Friday night's shocker, the 12th-place Saints coming through after 60 minutes with a 4-3 win over the Crimson--No. 2 in the conference.

Is that what it took?

Perhaps.

Crimson junior Jason Karmanos had a goal rightfully disallowed after intentionally kicking the puck into the net, sophomore Joe Craigen lost one on a questionable high-stick call--and then there was the Brad Konik sequence at game's end.

Last year, Appleton Arena saw Harvard's Brian Farrell '94 score with four seconds left to tie the Saints, Perry Cohagan scoring 2:11 into overtime for the win. Unbelievably, this year's final seconds saw Steve Martins move the puck just as Farrell did along the left-side goal-line for a stuff-in attempt at the near post; Konik actually got to the rebound and flipped it into the net with the clock showing :01 remaining.

But the net had been dislodged. Should the goal have counted? Technically, no. Should a penalty shot have been awarded to the Crimson if a St. Lawrence player intentionally knocked the goal off its moorings? Yes, undoubtedly.

But no call was made. To Harvard Coach Ronn Tomassoni's credit, he refused to jump all over the backs of referees Joseph Kelly and Mike Noeth after the game--"The referee has a difficult job, and he makes the best call he can in that situation," Tomassoni said. "Obviously, I was arguing for a penalty shot, but [Noeth and Kelly] didn't see it that way."

"It crossed my mind that lightning might strike again," Marsh said. "If they'd have called for a penalty shot, that probably would have scared the death out of me. But if we're going to do anything to stay respectable, we've got to get tough and create breaks for ourselves, and we did that."

Hummm...maybe you should forget about what I said about Harvard having no control over its ECAC destiny. The Crimson may have lost Friday's game on a couple of bum calls, but that SHOULD NOT happen against the league's worst team unless you put yourself in position to get jobbed.

And when Harvard pulls an oh-fer on the power play, conceding a short-handed goal in the process ("[The power-play] hurt us more than anything." Tomassoni said, without any prompting), well, there you go. Kudos to the Saints, deservedly pulling a season-reviving win out of the smoky rubble from the current ECAC season.

From the ridiculous...to the ridiculous, if you will, at Clarkson the next night. Understand this, first, about the ECAC: going into the weekend, Clarkson was the only ranked conference team in the Troy (N.Y.) Record Top Ten--with only 19 votes, a full 54 behind ninth-ranked New Hampshire.

Of course, the ECAC leads the nation with teams in the "Also Receiving Votes" category--Brown had 17, Princeton five, Vermont two, even one for Harvard. This is all subject to change, mind you, as none--zero--of those five teams managed a two-win weekend.

All of which means, don't plop down your life savings into an ECAC account in Vegas or with Ladbrokes. There really is no way of telling what's next...

...especially with Noeth and Kelly in the house, again at Clarkson your friendly referees. (Poster children for Instant Replay in the ECAC? As the zebras themselves love to say, "You make the call.")

Suffice it to say that Cory Gustafson looked clearly offsides on the Konik goal which evened the game at 3-3. Cohagan mentioned that Kelly and Noeth "came into the dressing room before the game and clarified a couple of rules for us, and one of them was that if you are dragged into an offside position, they won't call that anymore."

This Gustafson was, perhaps, but 'twas a dodgy call nonetheless that kept Konik chugging up the right wing for a goal which might rank alongside Farrell's from last year in terms of potential future impact.

Especially after another Frozen North overtime goal for Perry "I Love This Road Trip" Cohagan, Harvard could again be on the road to normalcy atop the ECAC standings. Harvard did very well to outshoot the Golden Knights 43-30, and when Tomassoni spoke of the "grit" and "determination" that his troops showed on the Cheel Arena ice, you knew Konik was right:

"Breaks come and go," he said. "But we definitely deserved this one."

***

My father shot himself in the head on Friday afternoon. I didn't find out about it until Friday evening, when I called my family from the pay phone in the lobby of the hotel in Canton, N.Y., in which we were staying between games, along with the Harvard and Brown hockey parties.

I staggered out of the phone booth, and standing in the hallway were Tomassoni and Brown coach Bob Gaudet, the first people I blundered into--irony of ironies, for those of you who know me, that in an hour of need I blundered into a couple of hockey guys for whom I have tremendous amounts of respect.

Tomassoni was great to me that night--really, a class gentleman. He took me into his room and was a source of strength and comfort for me for several hours, along with Harvard trainer Dick Emerson and WHRB cronies Eric Adelson and Jim Cowie.

Thanks guys, especially Coach Tomassoni. Nice guys don't always have to finish last, and if the Man Upstairs had anything to do with the questionable call that led to Konik's equalizer against Clarkson, so be it. Tomassoni certainly earned it the night before, at least in my book.