The Harvard men's soccer team suffered its first defeat of the season against Hartwick on Saturday, 3-1, and saw its record fall to 3-1-1 on the year.

The Crimson, which entered the contest ranked second in New England and 19th in the nation, did not play the type of soccer that has earned it such high rankings to date.

The booters watched the game slip out of their hands in the first 20 minutes in Oneonta, N.Y., as Hartwick scored at 5:01 of the first half on a Mark Melttrick goal. Paul Cushion tallied for the hosts at 17:05--and just two minutes later, Todd Karpy scored off Harvard goalie Chad Reilly to push the lead to 3-0.

Nineteen minutes gone, and the Crimson was already faced with a near-impossible uphill battle against a Hartwick squad ranked 15th in the country.

"We played at about 50 percent," Harvard freshman Nick D'Onofrio said. "We got down right away--it's hard to get back from three goals down."

The booters did get on the board at 26:23 on a D'Onofrio goal that was assisted by Nick Hotchkin--but that lone tally marked one of the few times that the Crimson offense played up to par. Over its previous four games, Harvard had scored a total of 11 goals in contests against MIT Columbia, Connecticut and Brandeis.

"It was an off-day; we did not get into any kind of flow," Crimson Coach Jape Shattuck said. "But we did [flow] briefly and showed that we could penetrate their defense, which was heartening."

Bright Spots

There were several bright spots in an otherwise disappointing game, however. Sophomores Ramy Rajballie, Robert Bonnie and Chad Reilly continued to perform well for the booters.

Reilly, Harvard's back-up goalie, has been filling in for an ill Stephen Hall since the third game of the season. "Reilly is superb, amazing--he would be starting in most other colleges," Shattuck said.

Saturday, Harvard returns home--and returns to Ivy League action--to face a much-improved Cornell team, which is coming off a 4-1 victory over Yale. But the Crimson is also a better squad than the 8-6-1 edition that lost to the Big Red last year, 2-0.

"This is definitely the best Harvard team I've ever coached," Shattuck said. "If we are on, we can beat pretty much any team."

Captain Paul Nicholas, returning to action Saturday after missing several games due to injury, added, "It is only our first defeat of the season--it is not the end of the season."

"We did not play like we can," Nicholas added. "We just never got into the game."