Jonnie on the Spot: Men's Hockey Shows its Grit

John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Change that first word to “hockey,” and you’ve summarized the Harvard men’s hockey team’s weekend series with Princeton and Yale.

Going into the two-game set, the Crimson (9-6-3, 8-3-2 ECAC) was riding a three-game winning streak and hadn’t lost an ECAC contest since dropping a 5-1 decision to Vermont more than two months ago.

Looking at its opponents—a combined 9-20-2 going in—Harvard seemed poised to run its already-impressive ECAC mark to 9-2-2 with a weekend sweep.

Unfortunately for the Crimson, it didn’t work out that way.

In other words, “hockey” happened to Harvard—specifically a 2-1 loss to the Tigers (6-13-0, 5-7-0 ECAC) on Friday night.

Is Harvard a better hockey team than Princeton? Absolutely. The Crimson dominated the game physically and finished with a 38-18 advantage in shots on goal.

In that respect, it was hard for the Crimson to be too disappointed. As Harvard Coach Mark Mazzoleni said after the game, when you run into a hot goaltender like Princeton’s Dave Stathos, there isn’t really much you can do about it.

“I thought our kids played very hard. We had our chances,” Mazzoleni said. “That’s hockey, though, when you run into a good goaltender. You run into games like this throughout the year.”

He then concluded with a shrug and the two words that best described the night: “It happens.”

The Princeton loss made the next game effectively Harvard’s biggest of the season thus far. With Yale (5-10-2, 5-5-2 ECAC) sitting in second place, the Crimson knew things wouldn’t be easy against its archrival—its 1-20-3 all-time record at Bright Hockey Center notwithstanding.

Harvard could simply not afford to be swept heading into the exam break, during which teams trailing the Crimson will be able to catch up while the Harvard players push pencils in Science Center B and Emerson 105.

The Elis, however, certainly didn’t make things easy, taking leads of 1-0 and 2-1 in the first and second periods, respectively. Yale goaltender Dan Lombard looked solid in the early going, and the Bulldogs’ free-skating, aggressive style limited Harvard to fewer scoring opportunities than it had the night before.

As it turned out, though, the Crimson didn’t need that many. The bounces that went Princeton’s way on Friday were Harvard’s this time.

In that sense, “hockey happened” again on Saturday. This time, though, it played to the Crimson’s favor.

But Harvard’s win was due to more than that. The Crimson’s top scorers stepped up against Yale, and freshman Dov Grumet-Morris was solid between the pipes in his fifth league win of the season.

“That was a very, very big win for us after losing to Princeton,” Mazzoleni said of the win over Yale. “A lesser team would have had their heads down, but we came back. I thought we played very, very hard and with a focus. We had some adversity during the game. We were behind, we took some penalties, but we came out and made a difference when we had to.”

Sophomore winger Tyler Kolarik was proud of his team’s performance, as well.

“Coming back tonight shows how much character we have on this team. You can feel it in the locker room and see it in how the guys are playing,” he said.

And in the intense, playoff-like atmosphere on Saturday night, Harvard’s best put forth their best efforts. Kolarik, Brett Nowak, and Dominic Moore—the Crimson’s three leading scorers—all had tallies after Yale took a 2-1 lead midway through the second.

Each goal was a near-perfect snapshot of what that trio brings to the team, a virtual work of art on skates.

Moore’s was perhaps the most dramatic of the three, as it came on the rarity of rarities—a penalty shot.

With the Crimson applying increased pressure in the offensive end, Moore fired a shot that rung a pipe before bouncing into the crease behind Lombard.

A mad scramble ensued, and Yale defenseman Greg Boucher was forced to cover the puck in the crease with 6:45 to play in the period. Boucher’s infraction drew a whistle from referee Jack Dunn, who awarded Moore with a solo try.

Moore routinely addressed the puck at center ice with the sellout crowd of 2,776 standing on its feet. With every eye on him, Moore—the calm, collected leader—beat Lombard as if it was a formality, then casually raised his stick into the air as he had so many times before.

And what team could lose after that? Certainly not the Crimson. Kolarik and Nowak saw to that.

Kolarik—his legs pumping like pistons as he spun in front of the Yale goal—was able to collect a rebound on his backhand side and flip it past Lombard. The ever-energetic Kolarik was knocked off-balance as the puck crossed the red line, so it was with his helmet half-off and his back on the ice that he celebrated his fifth of the year.

And finally Nowak, as strong as always in front of the net, used his great hands and vision to pick the puck out of several bodies around Lombard’s crease and deposit it for the eventual game-winner.

Harvard’s big guns came up big. They knew they had to. They made “hockey happen” for the Crimson on Saturday night.

That’s what champions do, and if Harvard continues to show the character they exhibited this weekend, that’s exactly what they’ll be in March.

—Staff Writer Jon P. Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.