“How can you win hockey games when you don’t shoot?” Mazzoleni said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen points added to the scoreboard for not shooting the puck.”
Capitalizing on his scrappy play at both ends, sophomore Charlie Johnson propelled Harvard to its early lead with two quick tallies.
With junior Brendan Bernakevitch applying pressure to Minuteman goalie Gabe Winer as he skated to the right circle to clear a puck sent long down the ice, Johnson slid into position at the blue line to cut off any outlet.
When Winer’s pass feebly floated across the ice, Johnson gobbled it up and rifled it past him into the top right corner to take the lead.
“I tried to shoot as quick as I could because I knew they were going to hit me,” Johnson said. “I managed to find the corner.”
Just 14 minutes later, Johnson was again wreaking havoc for Winer, tipping home captain Kenny Smith’s shot from the point as a power play expired and prompting UMass coach Don Cahoon to pull his goaltender.
“You know, Charlie Johnson’s got to play with jam,” Mazzoleni said. “When Charlie Johnson plays with jam, that’s what happens. When he doesn’t play, you don’t even know he’s on the rink. I’m just telling you how it is. It’s the truth. He can be the difference-maker for us, if he plays with jam.”
But the hot pursuit of the puck and aggressive play dried up shortly after, as the Crimson managed just seven shots in the second period after unleashing 18 in the first.
Instead, similarly scrappy play from the Minutemen reversed the course of the game and nearly thwarted the victory.
Chipping at junior netminder Dov Grumet-Morris with 12 shots in the second period and crashing the front of the net, UMass looked strikingly similar to the Crimson of the period before.
The Minutemen’s effort was capped at 5:39 in the third by a tip-in on the doorstep by Stephen Werner, assisted by Jeff Lang and Greg Maudlin.
But solid goaltending from Grumet-Morris kept the game from spiralling out of control, recording 20 saves—including 17 in the final two periods.
Sent sprawling to keep the puck from the back of the net and on one occasion fending off as many as six shots in rapid succession, Grumet-Morris did what he has so often as of late—single-handedly held Harvard in games the skaters in front of him might otherwise not have been able to pull out on their own.
“He’s given us the type of goaltending we need to win, and we haven’t done our part scoring goals on that end,” Mazzoleni said. “If we hadn’t had Dov since [beating] Yale [Nov. 15], I’d hate to see what our record would be.”
—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.