Tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick...

The Harvard men's lacrosse team has not had a great year, to put it kindly.

First, the opening three games were rained/snowed/fogged out. Then, Harvard opened the season with four losses. Then, it started to display flashes of brilliance in losses to Brown and Princeton but lacked consistency.

But yesterday at Ohiri Field against New Hampshire, Harvard put it all together and broke out for a season-high 18 goals, moving Co-Captain Chad Prusmack to say, "We're an excellent team that sometimes plays poorly, not a poor team that sometimes plays excellently."

Boom!

Final score: 18-8, Harvard.

Don't look now, but with Saturday's win over Yale, Harvard (3-7 overall, 1-3 Ivy) has a little winning streak going.

"We played four quarters of excellent lacrosse," Prusmack said. "We took good shots and made very few mental errors."

All the quarters were excellent, but some quarters were more excellent than others--particularly the second and third periods.

The game was tied after 15 minutes of play, 3-3, but Harvard scored eight unanswered goals and ten of the next 12 over the next 30 minutes. All the Wildcats could do was mutter to themselves (and swear, which they did eloquently).

At one point, junior Mike Porter intercepted a Wildcat pass and sailed in unmolested on a breakaway. UNH goalie Chris Smith simply raised his arms over his head in a gesture of surrender. Porter scored.

It was that kind of afternoon.

Harvard Coach Scott Anderson felt good enough about his 13-5 lead to remove junior goalie Matt Camp (12 great saves) four minutes into the fourth quarter and put in sophomore Walter Sipe--who allowed three goals on 16 shots, but by then it was irrelevant.

The bench was cleared with a whopping five minutes to play.

"In the first quarter, we were rushing things, playing down to their level," said sophomore Steve Gaffney, who scored two goals in the game. "But then we started concentrating and doing the little things, taking advantage of mismatches and stuff like that."