ITHACA, N.Y.--All they needed was one more win to make the pain of a sub-.500 season go away. All they needed was one more Cinderella performance to again make their fans believe in miracles.

Saturday night, in front of a standing-room only crowd at Lynah Rink, the members of the Harvard men's hockey team did not get what they wanted.

In the second game of its ECAC quarterfinal series, Harvard fell to Cornell by a 4-1 margin, ending its season and destroying all hope for a repeat trip to Lake Placid.

Coupled with Friday night's 2-2 tie, the win was enough to give Cornell the three points it needed to clinch the series.

"It doesn't really hit you until you get into the dressing room and it is just the team," said captain Ashlin Halfnight after his final game in a Crimson uniform. "The full weight of it hasn't hit me yet."

After battling through the physical, penalty-infested tie on Friday, fatigue appeared to be a deciding factor as the Crimson was unable to rebound on Saturday.

"I thought that we were a little bit sluggish," Harvard coach Ronn Tomassoni said. "It was our second game [of the weekend] and our third game of the week, plus the facts that we were killing penalties the night before, playing the Tuesday game and did [a lot of] traveling in the last few weeks.

"I thought that Cornell was a little sluggish too, but it was certainly going to affect us more than them."

After emerging from the first period dead-locked at one goal apiece, Cornell exploded in the second stanza with two goals in a four-minute span to conclusively pull away.

First, with 12 minutes remaining in the period and with a man-advantage, Cornell senior Vinnie Auger blasted a shot from the top of the right face-off circle. The bullet soared over the body of a diving Halfnight and into the upper left-hand corner of the net for what would prove to be the game-winning goal.

Just minutes later, freshman Mike Rutter broke over the Harvard blue line and blistered a slapshot of his own to give Cornell the decisive 3-1 advantage.

The Crimson did not roll over and concede defeat. On the contrary, within the space of just over a minute, Harvard created three high-quality shorthanded offensive opportunities for itself, only to fall short each time.

A two-on-one break by Henry Higdon and Craig Adams was the first spoiled chance as Cornell senior Steve Wilson, showing why he is an All-ECAC defenseman, dove from behind Higdon to poke the puck out of danger.

Seconds later, Cornell goaltender Jason Elliott stuffed a breakaway attempt by senior Joe Craigen. And soon thereafter, sophomore Craig MacDonald fired a shot which pinged off of the crossbar.

"You can't get better opportunities than [those]," Tomassoni said. "Obviously you want to be selfish and score all three, and all three were very scoreable, but even if you get one of the three, then it is a whole new ballgame. If you get two then it changes things ever more."

"To not score those [goals] obviously hurt a little bit," Halfnight said. "But on the other hand, the momentum was in our hands at that point. There we were, supposed to be killing penalties, and we were the ones getting the good offensive opportunities."

Momentum firmly and permanently shifted to the Cornell side come the third period. Sensing victory, the Big Red went into a defensive mode and Harvard was left watching the final seconds of its seasons tick away.

"Any team going into the third period with a lead tends to go into a bit of a defensive shell and that's what they did." Halfnight explained.

It was the inability to score, the same problem which has plagued Harvard all year long, however, which led to the Crimson's final defeat.

In 19 of its 32 games this year, the Crimson scored two goals or less. Neither game in the Cornell series proved to be any different.

"Our inability to finish really ended up being the difference in this game," Tomassoni said. "And the facts of the matter are that we came away with the goose-egg. That more than anything described our season."

The only offensive light for the Crimson came with seven minutes left in the first period off a power-play wrister by junior Jeremiah McCarthy from the left point that snuck past the screened Big Red goalie, Jason Elliott.

Cornell answered two minutes later with a Tony Bergin putback, snatching away Harvard's lead.

With no Lake Placid trip on the horizon and a season which can only be classified as disappointing, Harvard now has seven months worth of offseason to rebound and rebuild its program.

"To the underclassman, I told them that we have a long road to climb," Tomassoni said. "We're not satisfied by any means with finishing eighth. This is not somewhere we want our program to be.

"We do not want to be battling for eighth, we want to be battling for first and to get ourselves back in the national picture. I'm not talking about two years down the road either--we want to be there next season."

With this season over, the Crimson can now embark on its new challenge. Unfortunately, for the three seniors--Halfnight, Craigen and Marco Ferrari--there is no tomorrow in their Harvard hockey careers.

And when the final buzzer sounded on Saturday night, the three "fearless warriors," as Tomassoni called them, realized that miracles can't happen all the time. Harvard  1 Cornell  4

CORNELL, 4-1 at Lynah Rink Harvard  1  0  0  --  1 Cornell  1  2  1  --  4

First Period

Har--McCarthy (Ferrari) 12:55.

Cor--Bergin (Papp, Smart) 14:53.

Second Period

Cor--Auger 7:35 (PPG).

Cor--Ruger (Moynihan) 11:16.

Third Period

Cor--Moynihan (C. Wilson, Knopp) 15:48.

Saves: Har--Prestifilippo 15-6-6 27; Cor--Elliott 7-7-6 20.

Power Play: Har--0/7; Cor--1/8.

Attendance: 3,824.