Most total points by a freshman: C.J. Young's nine is one more than Tod Hartje's eight.

Best band and crowd cheer: A perennial favorite: "Hey RPI, you're just a bunch of MIT rejects...and MIT sucks!" Another: "Hey Schwalb, you're not a goalie, you're a Q-Tip!" isn't so funny anymore. The Yale netminder recorded 38 saves in Yale's triumph over Harvard Tuesday.

Best prediction: Barakett's statement that the Yale game at Ingalls Rink should be the toughest ECAC game of the season.

Worst defeat administered to Harvard by a former captain of Harvard's best post-war team (21-3-2, 1962-'63): Yale's Tim Taylor, 4-2.

Messuri's Missiles: Princeton sophomore John Messuri, with 26 points, has taken over first place in the ECAC scoring race. Harvard's Barakett, with 25 conference points, and MacDonald, with 24, stand second and third.

Barakett and MacDonald are tied for first, however, with 14 league goals apiece.

MacDonald's 17 total goals give him an average of 1.1 goals per game. Tim Smith, last year's Crimson leader, tallied 28 goals in 34 contests.

Before the Yale game, Harvard's incredible pair of netminders, Devin and McEvoy, claimed first and second places in the conference goals-against-average race.

McEvoy has since slipped into the fourth position, but the duo's combined 2.00 g.a.a. is still 0.47 better than that of last year's national g.a.a.-leader, Crimson goalie Grant Blair.

Layoff lag: Since 1953, Harvard is only 20-14 in the first game after its three-week break.

This season, the Crimson's first post-break contest is also the first game of the Beanpot, on February 2. If Harvard is to have any chance of winning its first all-Boston tournament since 1981, it will have to improve on its 5-5 record in Beanpot contests played immediately after the break.

Northeastern, the Crimson's first-round opponent, sports a 5-13-3 record, and is fifth in the seven-team Hockey East. If all goes well, Harvard will face the fourth-ranked B.C. Eagles in the Championship Round a week later.