Kolarik attempted five shots in the third period alone, three of them on net. He rung the crossbar 15 seconds into the period and had his best opportunity with about 14 minutes left on a fluke three-on-one.

Junior defenseman Noah Welch gained possession after a clearing attempt bounced off a Brown skate and back toward the slot. Welch worked it left, and feathered a cross-ice pass to the crashing Kolarik.

He pushed it wide of an open net. It was that kind of a night.

“I don’t think Danis won the game for them,” Kolarik said. “Certainly, they competed hard, and we competed hard, but we didn’t get anyone to the net, and we didn’t finish our chances.

“We did some good things in the third period, but overall we didn’t play well at all...It’s very disappointing.”

The second period was critical, as Harvard was undone by a defensive misstep and two five-on-three penalty kills.

The game-winner came at even-strength, when senior defenseman Dave McCulloch and freshman blue-liner Dylan Reese—playing their first game together—each took the body on winger Mike Meech. That left the puck for Chris Swon, who swept down the left side and beat junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris at 10:21.

The second (and more costly) five-on-three came in the 16th minute. After a penalty call for having too many men on the ice and a Noah Welch cross-check, Brown needed little more than a minute for Cory Caouette to roof the rebound of Scott Ford’s point shot past Grumet-Morris.

That put Brown up 2-0, and the second intermission horn sounded Harvard’s death knell, given that the Crimson is 0-8-1 the last nine times it has trailed after 40 minutes. Harvard’s last win under those circumstances was against Brown in the 2002 ECAC playoffs, and it has not come back from a two-goal deficit after two periods to win since Dec. 29, 2001 against Bowling Green.

But as the Crimson filed out of a silent dressing room and into an unseasonably warm Saturday night, present concerns surely outweighed past. Many have pointed to this year as a potentially special season for Harvard, and captain Kenny Smith said before he left the rink that he would gather his team for a players-only meeting on Sunday.

“I don’t want to let this sit with everybody for a day,” he said.

—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.