The last two Harvard men’s hockey seasons had the same beginning (season-opening loss to an underdog Brown team) and same ending (first round exit from the NCAA tournament).

The Crimson can take its first step toward changing the latter by reversing that other disturbing trend on Saturday night, when it hosts the Bears to begin a highly-anticipated 2003-2004 campaign.

Harvard’s uber-talented varsity must exercise caution, though, amid bad omens. As in its last two openers, the Crimson is ranked nationally (No. 9). And, as in its last two openers, Brown is not.

Harvard is everyone’s pick to win the ECAC and possibly make a run in the NCAA tournament. Brown is still the upstart.

The circumstances are eerily similar. Harvard hopes the result isn’t.

“You know, some people said, ‘Harvard lost to Brown?’ but I’ll tell you what, Brown’s got a pretty good team, and they have an All-American goalie [Yann Danis], too,” said Crimson coach Mark Mazzoleni, who begins the season 16 wins shy of 300 for his career. “They play a very defensive-minded style. They’re big. They’re strong. They’re physical. They compete. They take away your space. They’re strong on the puck. They win battles on the wall. And they’re very good in goal.

“You have that formula, you’re going to beat a lot of teams.”

The Harvard-Brown rivalry is the oldest going in college hockey—this weekend will mark meeting No. 139—and it has become increasingly intense of late, with six meetings in the last two seasons (Harvard is 4-2).

The central figure in the recent renewals has been Danis, the French-Canadian dynamo whose 66 saves in a 2002 ECAC playoff game at Bright Hockey Center are the most ever by a Crimson opponent. This off-season, he turned down multiple NHL free-agent offers—including one from his favorite boyhood team, the Montreal Canadiens—to return for his senior year.

“He’s a helluva goaltender,” Mazzoleni said. “Every game Danis is in the pipes, they’ll enter that game thinking they can win, because of him.”

Said Harvard senior Tim Pettit: “He can win a game by himself.”

Danis is 1-3 lifetime against Harvard (his only win was in last year’s season-opener), but he is playing behind a physical defensive corps that lost only one everyday player to graduation and is known for its ability to collapse around net, clog passing lanes and swipe away rebounds.

“It’s going to be up to us to stay spread out and keep the passing lanes open,” Harvard captain Kenny Smith said. “We’re going to work on getting shots on the net, crashing the net and getting traffic in front. He’s an excellent goaltender, but if you take away his vision, he’ll have a hard time blocking shots.”

Junior Dov Grumet-Morris will start opposite Danis, completing a match-up of the ECAC’s top returning goaltenders. “It’s just like a great pitching duel,” Grumet-Morris said. “We saw a couple great baseball games over the last couple weeks, and I liken a good goaltending match-up to that.”

Regardless of how the duel between Danis and Grumet-Morris plays out, Mazzoleni said this week that sophomore John Daigneau (4-1-0 with a 1.45 goals-against average in five games last season) will start one game during next week’s road trip to Vermont and Dartmouth.