Pettit jabbed and Kolarik poked, but it was eventually Moore’s stick that sent the puck past Walsh for Harvard’s second last-minute goal in as many nights.
While the scoreboard may have been equivalent on both sides, the postgame reaction in the two locker rooms was anything but.
“It’s an awful letdown,” Clarkson coach Mark Morris said of Moore’s late goal. “We keep beating ourselves this year. For most of that 60 minutes, we played very thoroughly.”
Naturally, Mazzoleni saw things in a different way.
“We wanted two points tonight, no question, but to come back and earn a point like this is really big,” he said. “It’s kissing your sister, but this is a point that will help us down the road.”
In keeping with the theme of the weekend, Mazzoleni was pleased with how hard his team played.
“It’s a positive sign the way our team continued to play,” he said. “We didn’t have a lot of jam in the first period, but as the game progressed we had the better scoring chances.”
A good number of those chances were near-misses, as the Crimson saw two goals disallowed and also hit the pipes twice.
But while Harvard had many chances during the game, it was Clarkson who drew first blood.
Well into the first period, standout freshman winger Jay Latulippe borrowed a page from SLU’s Ball and weaved a pass through the neutral zone and to sophomore center Jean Desroches, who beat Crothers for a 1-0 Clarkson lead at the 13:29 mark of the frame.
The goal seemed to energize the Knights, who took control of the game for the remainder of the period and into the second.
Fortunately for the Crimson, Kolarik was able to halt that momentum about halfway through the second frame.
Harvard defenseman Dave McCulloch worked the puck across the neutral zone to Rob Fried, who was able to chip it along the boards to Kolarik just outside the Clarkson blue line.
And that’s when the show began.
The sophomore winger carried it into the zone by himself and virtually skated a circle around one of two Clarkson defenders in the zone before deking Walsh and putting a backhander by him to tie the game at 8:16 of the frame, effectively dropping the jaw of the 2,634 assembled at Bright.
The tally was Kolarik’s second on both the weekend and the season.
The Knights responded later in the period, as David Evans pounded a rebound past Crothers at 15:35 of the frame.
“[Winning on the road] has been a real big challenge for us,” said Clarkson Coach Mark Morris after his team dropped to 0-5-2 away from Cheel Arena. “It’s been a long, hard year for us. To keep positive has been a challenge.”