HANOVER, NH--Somewhere along the road from Cambridge, the temperature dropped 20 degrees and the sunshine turned to snow.

The Harvard women's hockey team got locked in the deep freeze, failing to Dartmouth, 4-1, in its last Ivy League contest of the year.

The icewomen closed out their Ivy season with a 5-5 record, probably good enough for a third-place finish behind Brown and Princeton.

It was not, however, a typical road loss, characterized by a slow start and shaky "bus legs."

Instead, it was Dartmouth that opened the game as though it had just finished a two-hour bus ride.

"We've never done that before," Harvard Coach John Dooley said. "We came right off the bus and took the game to them."

The Crimson outshot the Big Green, 11-4 in the first period and converted on a power-play opportunity to jump to a quick lead.

And then, only then, did the deep freeze set in for one crucial and deadly period.

"We got lazy in the second period, and it killed us," Dooley said.

"The story of this game is really the story of the last two or three Ivy games," Crimson goalie Tracy Kimmel noted. "They've been decided in one period."

And because of the 20-minute lapse, Harvard had to head back to balmy, Cambridge with its third consecutive Ivy loss.

The game opened with the kind of chance that doesn't come along too often in women's hockey, as two members of the Big Green drew penalties within 30 seconds of each other.

Despite being up two players, however, the Cantabs couldn't maneuver into position to work one by Dartmouth goalie Kristen Bjork.

The next time around, however, when Big Green Co-Captain Estey Ticknor was whislted for tripping, Harvard made good.

Crimson forward Genie Simmons drove the puck through crowd of green shirts to make the score 1-0 after 13 minutes of play.