LAKE PLACID, N.Y.—Bless you, boys.

As I watched the Harvard men’s hockey team mob Crimson winger Tyler Kolarik after he scored the game-winning goal in the ECAC Championship Game on Saturday night, those three words kept going through my mind.

Maybe that’s because I remember them as the slogan of the first champions I ever knew, the 1984 Detroit Tigers. I was two years old at the time, but I have vague recollections of my father telling me that a championship was something very special.

And the members of this Harvard hockey team are champions in every sense of the word.

Bless you, boys.

As I stood in the press box at the 1980 Olympic Arena, I wished I could walk onto the ice as the team celebrated and say to them, “You have shown great character. You have made Harvard proud.

“You are champions.”

But they didn’t need to hear that from me. They knew that. The smiles on their scraggly-bearded faces showed that.

They understood just how far they had come and how much they had come together as a team since going 2-8-1 in the final 11 games of the regular season. They understood that coming back from the adversity they faced to win an improbable three consecutive overtime games in the ECAC playoffs was something very special.

They understood they were champions.

Bless you, boys.

It was the biggest win of Harvard’s season—heck, you have to go back to the Crimson’s last trip to the NCAA tournament in 1994 to find a more meaningful game—and it couldn’t have come at a better place than Lake Placid, site of the United States’ historic defeat of the Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics.

Certainly, the return of the “Miracle on Ice” to the national consciousness—in the wake of the Sept. 11 tragedies and Salt Lake City Games—made Lake Placid an even more meaningful venue this season.

And when a very moving national anthem was sung before Saturday night’s game, anything less than a classic college hockey game between two great rivals would have been a letdown.

Harvard and Cornell didn’t disappoint. The game was well played on both sides, with each team working hard for its offensive chances. Each was dominant for stretches and had the crowd sitting on the edge of its seat all night long.