ITHACA, N.Y.—For a team that came so close to victory, the Harvard men’s hockey team hasn’t looked this defeated in a long, long time.

Saturday night’s 1-0 loss to archrival Cornell left the Crimson battered, bruised and, in all ways, beaten.

And everything felt worse because, in a predictably crazed Lynah Rink, Harvard was intense, rather than intimidated. This time, the coaches’ clichés were true: the Crimson really, truly played hard. At times, Harvard played pretty well, too.

The Crimson players forechecked masterfully and stayed out of the penalty box—two things Harvard needed to do in order to win. Junior goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris made a half-dozen showstopping saves, the latest installment in what has been the best stretch of his college career.

There was no faulting anyone’s effort.

And that’s what was so frustrating about it.

Harvard, favored almost unanimously to win the ECAC, with a dozen NHL prospects on its roster, is now 5-4-1. It was uncharacteristically outshot both of this weekend’s games. It was shut out in three of its first 10 games for the first time in the 104 seasons of Harvard varsity hockey.

Something is wrong. So far, no one’s been able to fix it.

“We’re frustrated right now,” assistant captain Tyler Kolarik said after Saturday’s game. “It’s a matter of getting it done. There isn’t much to say.

“I don’t have the answers.”

No one else seems to, either.

Harvard is being outshot, but not outworked. Its power play, featuring some of the East’s most talented players, is only the sixth-best in the league at 17.1 percent. And even though 11 of the team’s top 13 scorers are back from last season, when it averaged a league-leading 3.91 goals per game, the Crimson has the ECAC’s ninth-best scoring offense (2.60).

By now, everyone thought this team—with 16 seniors and juniors—would have learned how to win without graduated stars Dominic Moore ’03 and Brett Nowak ’03.

Instead, the team’s upperclassmen leaders are still trying to make sense of what’s going on. They want to change course—only they don’t seem to know how.

They do, however, know what it takes to reach the NCAA tournament. They’ve done it two years in a row. Better than anyone, they know what it takes.