PROVIDENCE--No one expected the 1988-'89 Harvard hockey team to be just as good as last year's version.

But this is downright ridiculous.

Let's get this straight: Brown tied Harvard, 3-3, here Saturday night. Brown, the team that took a nap last November while the Crimson poured 10 pucks into the net. The team that finished at the bottom of the ECAC barrel. The team that still owns a 27-game winless streak.

Yale could be rationalized. At least Friday's 6-2 loss could be chalked up as a product of first-game jitters and the old El: jinx. But Brown?

Blech.

Harvard had the talent and the title. But Brown had the desire and the drive.

Cleary has 15 players back off his NCAA championship squad. Brown Coach Bob Gaudet had a bushel of freshmen--10 on his starting lineup, to be exact.

And these are not NHL second-round draft-pick freshmen we're talking about here. These are the guys that didn't even make it on Ronn Tomassoni's scouting list.

But these guys had guts.

Real Thing

What it worked out to was a double-dose of reality for the Crimson, which finds itself near the bottom of the league standings after the ECAC's opening weekend.

How did things go so wrong?

"I wish I knew what did happen," junior Pete Ciavaglia said. "For the most part, we didn't work as hard as we could. We have a lot of things to work on."

Oh yes, the Crimson should have a pretty long practice this afternoon. When asked what Harvard needed to work on, Coach Bill Cleary answered, "Where should I start?"

He could, perhaps, start with a little lesson about on-ice etiquette. See, the kids from the smart school played some pretty stupid hockey at times last night.

"You can't have penalties like that," said Cleary, whose team was whistled 10 times in the second period alone. "We would get power plays and practically the whole power-play [set] is in the penalty box."

No Plan

The Crimson got away from its game plan. Slapped and slashed a little too much, skated and scored a lot too little.

The bottom line, however, is that is was only one weekend. No one vacuumed up Harvard's talent over the summer. The Crimson was still, in the end, the best team on the ice.

"I don't want people to get all excited," Harvard Coach Bill Cleary said. "People got spoiled last year. We're not going to do that all the time."

And, as far as NCAA MVP Ted Donato is concerned, the past it past. Leave all comparisons to last year at the door.

"What we did last year was what we did last year," Donato said. "This is a different team. We have to make a name for ourselves."

And they'd rather not have that name be based on this weekend. File that away with the past as well.

"This is a lesson we have to learn and it's a tough one," Donato said. "We have to just grin and bear it."