Favorite Harvard Game Memory

[JasonN95]

First of all, you should probably know that the first Cornell-Harvard men's hockey game was in 1910, regardless of when the programs each started playing. Harvard beat us 5-0 at St. Nicholas Rink in New York City.

In no particular order:

It's worth mentioning that the context of the 2003 ECAC title game was one of the factors that made it so special. The previous title game, 2002 in Lake Placid, there was a general feeling among the Lynah Faithful who'd made the trip that this should be our year. Yes, we'd had our usual crapfest in the Florida tournament, but we finished strong, and dispatched Yale and RPI pretty easily in the ECAC QFs and SFs respectively. There's always something exciting and aggravating about meeting Harvard in the playoffs, especially the title game, but this one in 2002 was particularly close and hard-fought, and when Harvard won in double overtime I think we all felt it more keenly. We hadn't won the title since 1997, and we'd come close enough in 2000 and 2001 (eliminated by SLU both times) that we really, really wanted this one. Watching Harvard go one-and-done in the NCAA tournament the following week while we trounced newly-DI Quinnipiac 6-1 in the same building wasn't as satisfying as you might think it would've been.

So internalize that for a moment, and then imagine what it must have been like for us the very next year, 2003, when we were absolutely 100% certain we had all the right pieces in place for a deep national run and might never have them again, and yet Harvard was still winning by a goal late in the third period in Albany. We literally could not believe that this was happening again. If you're going to write this article, I suggest watching video of this game from the third period on - there's a moment after Schafer had pulled LeNeveu from the goal when Harvard sent the puck toward our empty net, and the entire building lost three years from their lives as the puck wobbled on its edge and then magically curved away to the side. Mark McRae's game-tying goal shortly afterward was a thing of beauty, and some of us who watch video of the game on a regular basis all these years later are still not sure exactly how Sam Paolini got that puck (and himself) around the defender, or how he sniped the puck past Dov Grumet-Morris (who after all made the all-tournament team when LeNeveu did not), but it's hard to care when the result was so satisfying. The win cemented our year-long domination over the ECAC, and more so, it landed us in the #1 overall spot in the Pairwise, a spot in which we were not accustomed to finding ourselves.

Now let's go back to 1990, when McCutcheon was head coach and we had some pretty decent firepower on our team - Joe Dragon, Dan Ratushny, Kent Manderville, Tim Vanini, Ryan Hughes, Doug Derraugh, Trent Andison, et al., plus Jim Crozier as our star in net. Our hopes for an ECAC tournament title ended rather abruptly when RPI beat us in the semis in the old Boston Garden, but the previous week, Harvard marched into Lynah for the Quarterfinals as defending national champions, with Bill Cleary having already announced this would be his last season as head coach. We were smack-dab in the middle of what would eventually become a ten-and-a-half-year regular season winless streak against Harvard (three ties and seventeen losses, IIRC, plus three more losses in ECAC tournament play), yet we swept them 6-2, 4-2 to take away what Bill obviously felt should have been his opportunity for a victory lap and a return trip to the dance (they didn't get an at-large bid either, though that wasn't shocking back in the days of the 8-team field). In one of the worst displays of sportsmanship I've ever seen, Bill angrily marched his team off the ice after losing the second game without letting them shake hands with the Big Red, and immediately transitioned from coach to Harvard's AD. The ECAC's decision to name the regular season title trophy after him still galls some of us to this day.

I'll let someone else talk about Schafer's first game against Harvard as head coach in November, 1995, since I wasn't there - that's (sort of) the last time I voluntarily skipped a Cornell-Harvard game, since I instantly regretted it. I'll merely comment as an aside that following the aforementioned horrible winless streak, Schafer coached our guys to three straight victories over Harvard in 1995-96, including an obviously quite satisfying ECAC title game win in Lake Placid.

Last but not least, a little story about how my wife and I became engaged the day of the Harvard game two years ago:

http://elf.elynah.com/read.php?1,173733

Good luck with your article!

Said Videos from 2003: Paolini's winning OT goal and Mark McRae's tying goal with 33 seconds left

I was fortunate to be at the 2003 championship game, and to have gone to it with a few friends from Cornell who used the game as a reunion of sorts after not having been together for a few years. Wonderful outcome that briefly teleported us all back to that feeling of the "good old days on the hill."

It's tough to tell on the youtube clip for Paolini's goal due to the compression and the clip ending right at the end of the moment, but I've always thought, reading his lips, that Schafer says "What a f*cking game!" when the camera is on him as he walks across the ice. I get a chuckle out of that.

Rewatching those clips made me want to listen to Adam's enjoyable radio calls of the goals. They use to available here (http://www.elynah.com/?audio2003), but the links appear to be broken. Any chance those links can be fixed?