THE COMMISH: Icers Now On Rebound

When the men’s hockey team started yelling “The Commish” at practice a few weeks ago, I was happy that people were reading my column and were eager to give me feedback.

But I soon realized these chants were not positive reinforcement.

Apparently the team didn’t enjoy one of my articles, and I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out which one.

In The Commish column published on Feb. 20, I wrote that “the Crimson men play sleep-inducing hockey,” and that they are “more effective than NyQuil.” Then, just to make sure there was no ambiguity about my position, I concluded that Harvard would “likely have an early departure from postseason play.”

Well, I can only hope my predictions for the NCAA basketball tournament turn out better.

Over the last three weeks, the Crimson has gone from the ECAC’s most disappointing team to the squad no one wants to play. The Crimson dominated Vermont in the first round of the playoffs, out-scoring the Catamounts 8-3 in two relatively easy games. Watching that shellacking, it was hard to fathom that this was the same team that lost to Vermont just a month earlier.

Then Harvard moved on to face Brown: the same team that was the third seed in the ECAC, had all-world goalie Yann Danis and who allowed just one goal to the Crimson in the teams’ two meetings this season. But Harvard made Danis and the rest of the Bears look like they didn’t belong in the same rink. The Crimson notched seven goals in two games—eight if you count Tim Pettit’s tally that the refs missed—and outplayed Brown in every facet of the game.

Needless to say, they’re not so soporific anymore.

What makes this turnaround even more amazing is that we had been tricked earlier in the season into thinking that the Crimson was beginning to snap out of its funk, only to see it return to the same inconsistent play that had plagued the team before.

Remember that spirited 4-2 win at Colgate back in December against the team that would finish the season first in the conference? Remember how you thought that might be the one to build on, only to see Harvard drop four of its next five games?

Or how about that Miracle-like comeback against Yale in February? Certainly, that one would give the Crimson momentum down the stretch-run, right? It sure didn’t look like it three nights later when Northeastern outplayed Harvard to a 3-1 victory.

But this time, finally, it’s for real. On February 20, the Crimson’s record stood at 10-13-2. That night, Harvard went to Potsdam, N.Y., slugged out a hard-fought 2-1 victory over Clarkson and has never looked back. Since then, the Crimson is 7-1-1 and is now riding a five game winning streak.

And while Harvard is looking more like the team we all thought it would be back in November, the top teams in the league are looking less like the teams they were all year.

Cornell, the number two seed, is already gone. The Big Red was upended by the number nine seed Clarkson in the quarterfinals; Colgate, the one seed, showed its weaknesses as the ten seed, St. Lawrence, took the Raiders to third game; and the five seed, Rensselaer, was taken out by the Crimson’s next opponent, Dartmouth.

All this leaves Harvard in an enviable position. With a ticket punched for Albany and its nemesis Cornell taking an early spring break, the Crimson men might well end up where we all thought they would be—right at the top of the ECAC.

They’ve just taken an interesting route getting there.

—Staff writer David H. Stearns can be reached at stearns@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.