You're at a wrestling tournament, waiting for your first match. You look across at your opponent; he's wearing boat sneakers instead of wrestling shoes, dark socks (with the little sky-blue diamond embroidered in), he's got a purple tie-dye shirt under his singlet, and the whole outfit is crowned by his Dutch-boy haircut.

"No problem," you say to yourself, "I'll have this guy doing graduate work in ceiling architecture within two minutes."

The zero then flips a pretzle hold on you and you're pinned before you can snap the buckle on your headgear.

In almost the same way, the Harvard hockey team has wrestled with otherwise easy opponents this year too many times. No major decision, not even a moral victory. Just out and out upset losses to teams like Penn and Princeton, who in previous years the Crimson would blow away before laughing at.

And what it seems to come down to over and over again is that EVERYBODY gets psyched to play hockey against Harvard, but the favor is not always returned.

You watch the icemen skate against B.U., Northeastern in the Beanpot, and last night against Cornell, and you swear to yourself that this team looks as much like the one that lost to B.C. twice, and Northeastern once as the zamboni resembles an Audi Fox.

As always, kudos can be given out in bunches, especially after the Crimson's best-played affair since the 4-3 (that score again?) loss to B.U. on Pearl Harbor Day.

Never Again

John Hynes said that he played "my third best game of the year, after the game at Brown and the first game against Princeton," but anybody will tell you he may never make another save like the one he pulled on Cornell's Roy Kerling late in the final period.

John Cochrane continued his super play, portraying the star nobody knows but everybody cheers.

Cochrane, a stalwart on the never-know- what-to-expect Harvard power play said after the game, "Most teams are learning how to defense our power play a lot better. They're rushing at our forwards before they can work the puck and it's hurting us."

But then again, to see George Hughes's artistic man-up endeavor from Cochrane and McDonald in the second period makes you wonder why it can't be done like that against anybody, let alone a team who came into Watson riding a 12-game winning streak.

There's always a tendency to point fingers at someone or something when things don't go as planned, and though the Harvard hockey season has gone anything but smoothly this year, I keep finding my finger pointing straight up, to that Great Goal Judge In The Sky, and asking "Why, God? Why must you favor the Canadians all the time? Why must the guys in the tie-dyed shirts and boat sneakers play over their heads against us?"

"I'm beginning to think I don't live right or something," said defenseman Jim Trainor, after the Overtime Encounter of the Worst Kind. Trainor lives okay, it's the "something" that the iceman will have to right, and right now.