Turano was given the team’s Donald Angier Hockey Trophy, as the “player showing the greatest general improvement during the year.”

Then he had an exceptional summer of training. Turano was ready for a great year. So, so ready.

And now what? Surgery. Rehab. Sitting in the stands. This is one of those things in sports that just doesn’t seem fair. What did Kenny Turano do to deserve this besides work ungodly hard and give his teammates everything he had?

“I’m very upset,” Kolarik said outside Harvard’s locker room in Vermont Saturday night, as word began to spread about the severity of the injury. “Kenny’s a real good friend of mine, and a friend to a lot of guys on this team. Everyone loves Kenny.

“He puts his heart and soul into everything, and he’s going to be sorely missed if he has to be out for any period of time, and I pray to God that’s not the case.”

Sadly, it looks like he will be, and that grim realization seemed to go through the bench when Turano was helped off the ice. You could almost hear everyone on the Harvard bench say to one another, “Wow, man. This isn’t good. Kenny is so tough. He doesn’t just go down like that.”

So, they responded the way you’d expect them to, especially when considering six seniors on the ice Friday night live with him in Jordan (another member of the blocking group, Blair Barlow, was a healthy scratch).

Kolarik, who began the night skating on a line with Turano and junior Brendan Bernakevitch, finished with a goal and three assists. Packard scored two goals.

“Knowing the severity of the injury, it definitely gave us some extra motivation,” Packard said. “It’s really unfortunate, especially when he worked so hard this summer, and had a great training camp and pre-season here.”

“Kenny would’ve wanted us to keep fighting and get the ‘W’ for him,” Kolarik said.

That’s Kenny Turano’s nature, and that’s why all his teammates and buddies were so broken up Friday night.

While Harvard’s 12 NHL draft picks impressed pro scouts with their size, their skating or their shot, Turano’s greatest skill has always been difficult to quantify. But if players were judged on the great intangible statistic of effort per shift, he might be an All-American.

He just plain works. Hard. All the time.

But in a game where players are often judged—fairly or unfairly—based on the number of goals they score, Turano’s name always fell behind the Kolariks and Cavanaghs of Harvard’s team.

So maybe for the rest of the season, Harvard should be judged by its performance in Turano’s area of expertise. You know, work. Effort per shift. We’ll call it the Turano Quotient, TQ for short.