If hockey were a 30-minute game, then the Harvard men's hockey team would be looking pretty good. But alas, a team must play well for a full 60 minutes if it expects to pick up the two points for a win.

And Harvard once again suffered a massive collapse in the later stages of last night's contest, falling to the University of New Hampshire, 5-2, at Bright Hockey Center.

The Crimson (4-5-1 overall, 4-3-1 ECAC) held a 2-0 lead midway through the game, but the Wildcats (9-3-2, 4-2-2 Hockey East) retaliated with five unanswered goals the rest of the way to extend their unbeaten streak to eight games (6-0-2).

"I thought we came out of the gate and played a real strong first period, and the first seven, eight, nine minutes of the second period we played really well," Harvard Coach Ronn Tomassoni said. "But we made a couple of mistakes."

Those mistakes and a Royal pain in the neck, if you will, did Harvard in.

UNH senior Eric Royal scored two goals in the first 3:32 of the third period to break a 2-2 tie and put his team up for good.

From a Harvard standpoint, certainly these early third-period collapses have been happening all too often. Even in the 4-1 win over Brown last Saturday, the Bears got their only goal in the first minute of the final stanza.

Royal got his first tally just 37 ticks into the third. After a Wildcat dumped the puck into the Harvard zone, Royal picked the puck up at the left boards, cut in towards the goal and used his long reach to wrap the puck past Tracy, who had come out to challenge him.

Royal repeated the move and the result three minutes later on a two-on-one. He raced past a Harvard player to a loose puck to create the odd-man rush.

Royal deked Tracy on the fore-hand and lifted a backhand past the Crimson netminder to give his squad a two-goal lead.

"We like the big ice surface [at Bright Hockey Center]," Royal said. "It helps us spread out with our speed."

Nick Poole sealed Harvard's fate with an empty-netter in the final minute.

Given Harvard's several previous late collapses going into the game, one might not be surprised at what happened last night. But then again, the Crimson looked very solid for the first 30 minutes and had no reason to expect another disaster.

"We came out well in the first period," junior defenseman Peter McLaughlin said. "[But] for some reason, we either lost our poise, or we weren't playing the body and weren't skating to the holes as fast as we should. We didn't do the things we need to do to win."

Harvard outplayed the Wildcats in the opening stanza, but it would have come out of the period scoreless if UNH netminder Trent Cavicchi hadn't given the Crimson an early Christmas present.