Sometimes it takes a massacre to make a team forget its troubles.

When the Harvard men's soccer team came onto Ohiri Field yesterday afternoon to face Tufts, it still hadn't forgotten its heartbreaking 1-0 loss last Saturday to a Princeton team it had clearly outclassed.

Ninety minutes after the first touch, the booters had crased all memories of the unfortunate incident by crushing the Jumbos, 7-1.

The Crimson's season record now stands at 7-4.

"It's nice to put that loss out of our minds," Crimson Coach Jape Shattuck said. "I'm glad we scored. It's easy for a team not to score a lot of goals."

The booters, led by Captain Lane Kenworthy, who had four of the seven, made scoring a lot of goals look easy yesterday. Harvard came out banging from the jump, firing two shots at the Tufts goal before five minutes had passed.

The closest Tufts came in the first half was in the sixth minute, when the Jumbos' Kevin Johnson hit the crossbar with a header.

Then the eruption came.

It all started in the 16th minute after midfield wizard Paul Nicholas, who set up three of the Crimson tallies, sent a ball across the goalmouth which Jumbo 'keeper Roger Fenningdorf, who was in for a long day, bobbled.

Opportunistic Crimson midfielder Nikhil Singh knocked the gift into the net from point-blank range.

Three minutes later Kenworthy put a Miles Welch pass on the scoreboard after some strange bounces in the area. One minute after that, Singh, whose name means "lion" in Punjabi, used his catlike reflexes to jump up in a crowd and head a Nicholas cross over Fenningdorf.

In the 25th minute, striker John Catliff put himself on the board. After receiving an intelligent pass from stopper lan Hardington, who sent a beautiful ball from behind the midfield line right into his path, the big Canadian fired a well-placed left-footed volley past the hapless Fenningdorf from about 15 yards out.

Kenworthy finished the first half by scoring in the 33rd, 37th and 40th minutes. First the Crimson skipper pushed a Nicholas pass into the goal from about 10 yards out. Then he sent a powerful volley past the Jumbo netminder from right outside the 18.

He ended the Crimson's scoring, which all came in the first half, by beating Fenningdorf to a chip from Mark Pepper, and sizzling it into the open net.

Shattuck saw the alinost insurmountable lead (only a touchdown and a two-point conversion would have won it for the Jumbos) as a golden opportunity to give some of the Crimson reserves a chance to play, and he yanked most of the big guns after the first half ended.

Although the Crimson did not get any more goals in the contest, the not-as-big guns continued to dominate the Jumbos, and reserve 'keeper Brad Dockser spent most of his time leisurely watching the action in the other half of the pitch. In the second half, the Crimson fired as many shots (15) as it did in the first half.

Although the two Crimson 'keepers, Dockser and Matt Ginsburg, were hoping for a shutout, the Jumbos were finally able to get on the scoreboard in the 86th minute, when the Jumbos' Johnson knocked a Tom Donnelly cross past Dockser, who had come off his line to stop the Jumbo assault.

But by that time, the goal had about as much of an impact on the game's outcome as a flea stepping on an elephant's toe, and perhaps fittingly, a flock of seagulls began hovering over the Tufts half of the pitch like a bunch of vultures waiting for a wounded animal to die.

THE NOTEBOOK: The booters meet Brown Saturday morning at 11 a.m. at Ohiri in what Shattuck calls "the most important game of the season" ...The Harvard freshmen team had an even more impressive victory over Tufts, winning 8-0. Matt Widmer scored five goals for the winners...Kenworthy's four goals were just one shy of the Harvard record for one game, set by Chris Ohiri in 1961 and by Pete Bogovich in 1968. Not too surprisingly, both times the opponent was Tufts.