Harvard knew it had to stay away from two things: untimely penalties and early Cornell goals.

And it didn’t do either.

The Crimson’s early woes began 20 seconds into the game, when Noah Welch went in for high sticking. Eleven seconds after that, Cornell was up 1-0 and trainer Dick Emerson was on the ice helping Harvard goalie Dov Grumet-Morris work out the cobwebs after he got knocked in the head.

The clock read 19:29, Harvard was already down a goal, and Grumet-Morris was trying to blink and squint his way back to consciousness.

Heckuva start, huh?

It didn’t get much better. About four minutes later, another Harvard defenseman (Peter Hafner) took another ill-advised penalty (boarding on Chris Abbott), and another of the Big Red’s top scorers (Sam Paolini) made the Crimson pay with another power-play goal.

The game wasn’t even five minutes old, Cornell goalie Dave LeNeveu hadn’t seen a shot, and the bulk of the sold-out Harvard student section still hadn’t arrived, wooed into tardiness by the trappings of Beast Lite.

In its absence, Cornell fans dominated the barn. The Bright Center had indeed become Lynah East. Heck, it was Lynah North, South and West, too. It was Lynah Everywhere.

“Felt like a home game,” said Cornell forward Ryan Vesce.

The Big Red got even more comfortable a few minutes later when it went up 3-0.

Was this really happening? Was Harvard going to get routed in its biggest game on home ice in years? And is Beast Light really that good?

Mazzoleni called a time out, hoping to calm things down. His team was getting physically overwhelmed. Cornell looked bigger, faster and stronger. At that point, Harvard had more whiffs than scoring chances and would have needed to put at least four goals past LeNeveu, who hadn’t given up more than two in 15 starts.

Yep, the Crimson was up the proverbial creek, no paddle in sight.

But Harvard oh-so-slowly found its skating legs—and its confidence, more importantly—and drew the deficit to 3-2 thanks to absolutely gorgeous feeds by captain Dominic Moore to set up second-period goals by Dennis Packard and Tim Pettit.

“I don’t think anyone on the ice has better vision than Dominic Moore,” Pettit said.