IN LEHMAN'S TERMS: Big Green Defines Season Six-Pack

It’s a long season, that’s for sure.

The Harvard women’s hockey team takes the ice for its first practice in mid-October, plays its first game before Halloween, and doesn’t finish until some time in March.

All told, depending on its luck in the post-season, the squad will skate in between 29 and 37 contests. It will log countless miles on the road—venturing to such diverse locales as Duluth, Minn. and Canton, N.Y.—and shifts on the rink. Coach Katey Stone’s Crimson skaters will cross and re-cross the blue line until they are blue in the face.

Collectively, it’s a daunting proposition. And as a result, Harvard needs diversions, self-played psychological tricks, to stay as sharp mentally through the entirety as the blades on its skates. Otherwise, the endless winter is enough to turn a mind to mush.

One idea is to divide the five-month season up into smaller, more manageable portions. That’s exactly what Stone tried to convince her team of recently with the six-game stretch between Thanksgiving and Hanukkah.

The Crimson came away from its long-weekend journey to Duluth with a pair of 6-1 beatings at the hands of the talented Bulldogs that plunged the team’s record to 3-4-2. No matter, Stone said, rip off the next half-dozen straight and we’re back where we want to be.

“We have a six-game season between coming back from Duluth and breaking for Christmas,” Stone said. “We said ‘We want to go 6-0. If we go 6-0, we’re right back in the hunt.’”

The process began with a hard-fought 6-3 road win at feisty Providence. Then the holidays came early in the form of two cupcakes at home versus whipping girl Union. Next, Harvard handled another dangerous non-conference foe with a 3-1 dismissal of Connecticut on Thursday night.

Meanwhile, Stone’s preachings about this six-game season weren’t falling on deaf ears. The team, its leaders especially, were buying into the proposition.

“We talked about making this six-game stretch our new season,” junior Liza Solley said after the second Union rout. “And we’re trying to just finish 2005 strong.”

Unfortunately for the momentum built up at the beginning of the six-pack, the Crimson faced a superior UNH squad at Bright on Saturday. The now-No. 2 Wildcats matched Harvard in speed and athleticism and surpassed it in control and execution en route to a 3-0 victory. With the defeat went the hopes of that winning streak.

Stone, for her part, acknowledged the UNH’s strength and was not discouraged.

“We lost to a better team,” Stone said. “If we go 5-1 we’re still in very good shape. We don’t worry too much about what just happened as much as what we’re looking at.”

But what are they looking at? What will it take to reach 5-1? A win over none other than arch-nemesis Dartmouth. Only the traditionally most heated, closely-contested showdown in women’s collegiate hockey.

However forced the stress put upon these six games may feel, there’s absolutely nothing artificial about this rivalry. The home-and-home series is a two-game season unto itself and the meeting in Cambridge is the one game that’s circled on the calendar before the schedule even comes out.

The Crimson’s results against the Big Green usually go a long way in determining its annual success. A year ago, Harvard shocked its critics when it traveled north to Hanover and knocked off then-No. 2 Dartmouth behind five goals from superstar Nicole Corriero. The Crimson later scraped out a 4-3 win in the return meeting, prevailed in the ECAC tournament championship, and rode the positive vibes all the way to the NCAA title game. Harvard can only hope tonight’s game has a similar effect.

Although the Big Green has been looming a little less large and verdant of late, limping into town unranked, that has no effect on the potency of the match-up. Expect the two Ivy foes to bring out the best in each other and play with an intensity not betraying the ardor of the winter campaign.

To play like it’s a one-game season. And the end of the six-game season. In the middle of the season.

—Staff writer Jonathan Lehman can be reached at jlehman@fas.harvard.edu.