No need to worry, Harvard hockey fans. This happens every year.

For the third straight season, the Crimson icemen stand 0-1 after a season-opening loss to Brown, the latest ignominy Saturday night’s forgettable 2-0 blanking before 1,986 at Bright Hockey Center.

In each of the three losses, Harvard was nationally ranked—this time the highest yet, at No. 9—and Brown was not. The last two times, the Crimson’s response was the same: win the next game, and eventually make the NCAA tournament.

In the last four years, Harvard is 1-3 against Brown in the first game of the season, and 5-0 the rest of the time.

“I don’t know,” said Brown coach Roger Grillo, when asked to explain the phenomenon. “I don’t know what it is.”

That was the consensus reaction outside both dressing rooms, as coaches and players tried to figure how a team with 12 NHL draft picks and all but three regulars back from the nation’s sixth-best scoring offense laid a Zamboni-sized goose egg in front of its home crowd.

“We didn’t have it,” came the blunt explanation from Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni. “They deserved the victory, but we just had no rhythm, no crispness to our game.”

In contrast to the 2001 and 2002 openers, Harvard was outshot Saturday (24-20). The main culprit was a second period in which the Crimson had two five-on-three penalty kills—one of which was successful—and mustered a mere three shots on goal.

“It wasn’t that our kids didn’t try,” said Mazzoleni, whose team was whistled seven times for 14 minutes. “I don’t know if it was nerves, [being] anxious...We got it going a couple times in spurts and then we took some stupid penalties and lost our momentum.”

And so begins the most highly-anticipated Harvard hockey season in years.

“Just because the preseason polls say one thing doesn’t mean it’s automatically going to happen,” Crimson assistant captain Tyler Kolarik said.

The preseason polls, of course, declared that Harvard was the overwhelming favorite to win the ECAC, and also tabbed Brown’s Yann Danis as the league’s top goaltender. Saturday night marked Danis’s second career shutout of the Crimson and ninth overall.

He did so while facing an uncharacteristically light workload. Danis had gone 23 games without stopping 20 or fewer shots in a win, and this was his first career shutout in which he made 20 or fewer stops. After the game, Danis said that he “loves playing against” Harvard because it’s “one of the best teams in the country.”

“I’m 46 years old, and I was a goalie, and I think I could’ve had a shutout going into the second period,” Mazzoleni said. “He saw every puck. There was no traffic.”

Harvard players spent the evening making, and lunging for, passes off the boards, off their heels and off-target in general. One player noticeably on his game was Kolarik, whose fiery style and ever-churning skates gave him seven shots on goal, more than one-third of his team’s total.