Rebuild: 1. to build anew; 2. to restore to a previous condition; 3. to repair or remodel extensively, as by taking apart and reconstructing, often with new parts.

For the Harvard women's ice hockey team, the 1997-98 season marked the end of the rebuilding process. The previous condition to which the Crimson hopes to return is the form it held over a stretch from 1987 to 1991, in which Harvard captured the regular-season Ivy League title or the Ivy Tournament title every season.

The new parts that have been added include three Olympians--two of them gold-medal winners--one Canadian National Team member and a pair of rookies that took the ECAC by storm this season. Despite missing some of those parts this year, Harvard (14-16, 6-14 ECAC, 2-6 Ivy) established itself as a team on the brink of excellence in the world of women's college ice hockey.

After missing the playoffs in each of the past two seasons, Harvard returned to the postseason in 1998 and came within seven minutes of upsetting the eventual national champion New Hampshire Wildcats. In this, the first year in which the NCAA crowned a women's ice hockey national champion, Harvard gave a strong indication that it could vie for the crown before the end of the second millennium.

"I think when you play through everything we've played through, it builds character and it builds team unity, so that you have something beyond winning," said co-captain-elect Claudia Asano. "The newcomers and the players who are coming back next year are going to bond quickly because of that."

The Crimson, after all, entered the season shorthanded. Harvard's all-time leading scorer A.J. Mleczko '97-'99, a member of the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic Team, took her second year off to participate in the Nagano Games. Tammy Shewchuck '00-'01, who broke Mleczko's single-season school scoring record last season with 53 points in her rookie season, also took the year off to train with the Canadian National Team.

Harvard's 1998 roster included only one senior, goaltender and co-captain Jen Bowdoin, and she was recovering from off-season hip surgery. Moreover, the Crimson had only 10 skaters return from an undermanned 1996-97 squad and welcomed six freshman and two transfers to Cambridge.

"We were a very young team that had inexperience but a lot of talent," Asano said. "Both our younger and older players knew what our losses would be like, and we knew we would have to strive higher and play better."

Harvard was not expected to do much this season. But apparently no one told the players that.

A pair of rookies emerged from the ranks to steal the thunder from ECAC powerhouses Northeastern and UNH. Kiirsten Suurkask, the 1998 ECAC Rookie of the Year, and Angie Francisco, who broke Shewchuck's single-season scoring record, anchored a Harvard line that spilled over with talent.

Francisco led Harvard in assists and overall scoring this year with 36 assists and a record 57 points, and Suurkask was the Crimson's leader in goals with 30 and second in scoring with 51 points. They showed early and often a penchant for knowing where the other was on the ice, and most of each one's scoring chances came on setups from the other.

"Loose pucks around Francisco and Suurkask, they're gonna bury `em," said Harvard Coach Katey Stone. "They play off of each other so well. They just find each other somehow."

The Francisco-Suurkask tandem led Harvard's offense from Day One, helping the Crimson capture its first All-American Tournament Championship since 1993. In three convincing victories over national power Minnesota, Augsburg and Gustavus Adolphus by a combined margin of 18 goals, Suurkask tallied seven goals and three assists while Francisco contributed four goals and five assists.

"[Francisco and Suurkask] came in with an attitude of `nothing but the best.' They played their hearts out," Asano said. "They didn't care that they were freshmen. It's very difficult to step in at the college level and dominate, but that's what they did."

But after that 3-0 start, Harvard was plagued by inconsistency. The Crimson failed to win more than two games in a row until it swept its final three regular-season contests to earn a date in the playoffs with the Wildcats.