On a two-strike pitch, Galicinao drilled Koppel in the stomach with a two-strike pitch, seemingly her second hit batter in a row, which would have loaded the bases for sophomore second baseman Sara Williamson.

But soon after Koppel turned away from the mound in pain, the home-plate umpire yelled out, “Did she swing?” to the fellow umpires and received an affirmative sign. The stunned crowd took a good minute to realize that the game was over and then harshly voiced its displeasure.

Koppel was turning in to avoid Galicinao’s inside pitch, but from the umpire’s point of view, Koppel’s hands were moving towards the ball, which meant strike three instead of a hit-by-pitch.

Allard discussed the play at length with the officials. After the doubleheader, she did not refrain from calling it one of the worst calls she had ever seen.

“You never make a call like that to end a game,” Allard said. “You just don’t. There was nothing we could do about it, but it was a very wrong call.”

Harvard trailed 4-0 entering the bottom of the fifth and a comeback seemed like a long shot, given that the Crimson had managed just two hits from Williamson and one from tri-captain Lisa Watanabe in the first four innings, and none of the Crimson leadoff hitters had reached.

But Cooley broke that string by opening the fifth inning with a double that wound up at the base of the left-field fence. She advanced to third on a Goldberg sacrifice and scored on a failed pick-off attempt. Stefanchik followed up with a two-out triple, but Gordon couldn’t drive her home, leaving the score at 4-1.

Four runs proved to be too much of a deficit to surmount against Galicinao. The game was guaranteed to be a pitcher’s duel, and it was just that for the game’s first three innings as Guy and Galicinao each put of zeros on the scoreboard.

Princeton, which had multiple baserunners in both the second and third, finally got on the scoreboard in the fourth when Becky Nemec hit a leadoff double off Guy and came home on an RBI single by Mackenzie Forsythe.

The key to Harvard keeping Princeton scoreless in the third was the third-base play of Cooley, who assisted on all three outs of the inning and allowed Guy to get out of a two-on, no-out jam. The last out, a back-handed grab, saved at least two runs.

“I was struggling a little bit position-wise, finding out where I needed to play,” Cooley said. “So I worked with coach a lot on Friday before the games, and I went in with the attitude that I needed to play confident. I just started playing up a little bit more to take away the bunt. I worked on it and it came through.”

Guy became undone in the fifth inning when she allowed the first three runners to reach on singles. The next batter grounded slowly to Goldberg at short, and Goldberg took a high-risk by throwing home. Her effort went wide of Miller at the plate, and the end result was two runs scored, and Princeton still had runners at second and third with no outs. Guy was taken out of the game thereafter.

“[The Princeton players] were just good hitters,” Allard said. “They swung their bats. Suzanne pitched great, but they’re just a good hitting team and they’re going to adjust to somebody.”

Brotemarkle entered the game and let one of her two inherited runners cross the plate, but she shut down the Tigers the rest of the way.