After Brown’s season-opening victory over Harvard, Mazzoleni said that the Crimson must take more shots from the blue line and create traffic in front of the net to be successful.

Neither of these things happened Saturday night. If anything, Harvard utilized its defensemen even less than it did in the season-opener, and no blueliner figured in on any of Harvard’s five goals. The team also had few stretches of sustained pressure in the Brown zone, scoring most of its goals on quick plays.

In the end, all the Crimson needed to score against Brown was more discipline on offense.

“They tried to trap us in the neutral zone again tonight, but we didn’t turn the puck over in the offensive blue line the way we did in the first game,” Mazzoleni said.

Several Harvard forwards tried to create scoring chances by themselves in the first game, leading to an excessive number of turnovers as they discovered that none of them could skate past multiple defenders without losing the puck.

This time, Harvard waited for the scoring opportunities to present themselves, and the error-prone Bears provided the Crimson with plenty of easy chances.

“We just made too many mistakes, and they did a nice job of capitalizing on them,” Brown Coach Roger Grillo said.

Roughing

Brown came into Saturday night’s game hoping to make it a physical contest. Once Harvard pulled away, however, the quality of the physical play deteriorated.

“They were prepared for us, and our guys got a little frustrated,” Grillo said.

Play on the ice reached bizarre status three minutes into the third period. It began when Bear forward Tye Korbl leveled Harvard senior defenseman Liam McCarthy in the open ice. After the whistle, every player on the ice got into some sort of scuffle with an opposing skater, and for the next few minutes Meehan Auditorium looked more like a barroom than a skating rink.

The officials decided that the situation was just too chaotic to assign blame, so they just punished everyone. All ten skaters on the ice were given two minute roughing penalties, and an additional intereference infraction was charged to Korbl for his initial hit.

In a rare, almost-comical sight, eleven players stuffed themselves into the two penalty boxes, looking quite uncomfortable in compartments barely large enough to hold three skaters each.

Some Brown fans added to the ugly display, pelting the Harvard bench with garbage in the third period. Things got so bad by the time Harvard scored its fifth and final goal that referee John Melanson had to order arena security behind the Harvard bench to keep order.