For Steve Armstrong, home is not always mom and apple pie. Sometimes, it's taunts and dead fish.

Every year, Armstrong returns home to Ithaca, N.Y., for a hockey game. Harvard vs. Cornell. "One of the great rivalries in all of sports," as Harvard Associate Coach Ronn Tomassoni once said.

Every year, Armstrong--a Harvard forward and now the team's captain--plays in front of the home crowd. The home crowd treats Armstrong like a king. A king in the midst of a peasant revolt.

This year, Armstrong took the ice and got booed. Fish were tossed at him. Insults were shouted at him.

Once upon a time, a Harvard goalie--not a native, mind you, just another visiting sieve--expressed his feelings to the Lynah Rink crowd with a flip of a finger.

Steve Armstrong doesn't operate that way. He's cool. Cucumber cool. And he lets his actions speak for him.

Against Cornell in early December, Armstrong recorded a pair of assists to lead the Crimson to a 4-1 victory. He has also helped lead Harvard to a 12-2 ECAC record, good for first place in the league.

"I'll remember all four of the Cornell games," Armstrong says. "They're all different."

And, when he graduates in the spring, when he leaves Harvard and hockey. he'll remember all the winning Harvard has done.

The wins at Cornell. The win in last year's ECAC Tournament. The win in last year's NCAA quarterfinals.

"My fondest memory, right now, is last year's ECAC [Championship] victory." Armstrong says. "We worked pretty hard for it. Not that winning is everything, but that is the work of three years for some of us. It was great."

The Loss

And he'll remember the losses. Especially. The Loss. The 6-5 loss to Michigan State in the NCAA final in 1986.

Armstrong and his team are a regular memory machine. Each game brings new excitement, new emotion. Wins and losses. Wins and losses. But mostly wins.

This year, Harvard and St. Lawrence--the league's top two teams--met at Bright Center in early January. The game, a series of blistering rushes up and down the ice and shots fired in rapid succession from far and near, made Harvard Coach Bill Cleary ecstatic. For Cleary, the Harvard-SLU game was hockey the way it should be played.