UPSET OF THE YEAR: Men's Hockey 3, Boston College 1

All throughout the young season and its preceding months, Harvard men’s hockey coach Ted Donato ’91 had sworn his team just needed a little time.

Just a little time for the half-dozen-or-so starting freshmen to get the hang of things.

Just a little time for the pieces of a new coaching staff, a veteran defensive corps, and a young, upstart offense to fall into place.

Just give it a little time, Donato said, and the Crimson would pose a legitimate threat.

“I think, as a coach, I believed in what we were trying to do and what we were trying to establish,” Donato said.

It’s easy to say after a 21-win season that saw Harvard earn its fourth consecutive berth in the NCAA tournament, but could Donato have really believed that a Nov. 16 contest against then-No. 1 Boston College would be the Crimson’s coming-out party?

It certainly wasn’t supposed to happen. Not by a long shot.

Though the season was still young, Boston College had already beaten powerhouses like North Dakota, Maine, Denver, and UMass-Lowell.

Harvard, meanwhile, owned a middling 2-2-1 record after wresting a pair of victories from perpetual cellar-dwellers Yale and Princeton.

And when the Eagles stormed the Crimson zone and beat Harvard netminder Dov Grumet-Morris just 62 seconds into the game, well, that was supposed to happen, right?

Boston College was tops in the country, and the Crimson was miles from spitting distance of the rankings.

“We knew we were the underdogs,” freshman forward Jon Pelle said. “[But] every guy in that locker room believed that we could win. We knew that probably everyone outside the room didn’t think so, but we believed it.”

And if anybody was ready to disprove the world that loomed outside the locker room, it was Pelle, who had a hand in all three of Harvard’s unanswered goals.

Charitable as his 5’8 listing was, Pelle had slipped past an Eagles defense that ranged from 5’11 to 6’4 all night long, positioning himself in just the right spot at every opportunity.

“It was still early in the season,” said senior winger Andrew Lederman, “and we still had that young blood in us. Especially with the young guys, I think it was their energy—I think we not only matched, but surpassed [Boston College’s] energy.”

There was the first-period equalizer, the power-play slapshot rebound that Pelle collected, controlled, and deposited in the net Eagles goalie Matti Kaltiainen had abandoned for the initial save.

For this, the Bright Hockey Center crowd was cautiously excited. It was nice to tie the game, the fans seemed to say, but there was no need to jump to conclusions. This was Boston College, after all.

But then came the go-ahead goal, Lederman’s man-advantage blast from the high slot that bounced off an Eagles skater and through the goalmouth.

Suddenly, Harvard was beating the top team in the nation, and the Bright fans’ collective caution was abandoned.

The modest arena erupted, a sea of Crimson specked with the maroon and gold of Eagles fans but roaring nonetheless.

The excitement only grew when Grumet-Morris stonewalled Dave Spina’s second-period penalty shot, the netminder’s second such blanking of the season.

“That would certainly have given us a little more lift,” said Boston College coach Jerry York of the lost opportunity.

But Pelle’s second rebound-goal and the 3-1, third-period lead it gave the Crimson brought the Bright crowd back to earth.

The nervous buzz that serenaded the final frame of gliding skates and darting passes said only one thing: this looked too easy.

The two-goal lead had materialized too easily.

Harvard had shut down the potent Eagles offense too easily.

The Crimson penalty kill—which had suffered a woeful 42 percent conversion rate just three nights before—had smothered the Boston College power play too easily.

It was the performance of a national contender—not of a squad that was barely 2-2-1—and it was, according to Grumet-Morris, “huge.”

“It turned everything around,” the netminder said, “and I think that was the springboard for our season”—and a month-long stretch in which Harvard won seven of eight contests.

Before that month, Harvard came nowhere close to touching the national rankings. At the end of that month, the Crimson had climbed to No. 10 in the country.

It was a performance Donato and his squad knew they had within them, even if they were the only ones.

“Beating a team when it was No. 1 showed our players that we could win doing it [our] way,” the rookie coach said. “That was a huge mental hurdle for us, and I think it showed our guys.

“I think they believed, but they [hadn’t yet] had a chance to show us that when we played our best as a team, we could beat anybody.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.