“Coach was shuffling his lines and he gave me a chance,” said Turano, who Mazzoleni called the “quickest release on the team, along with Pettit”—high praise considering Pettit’s is widely regarded as one of the nation’s best. “My goal is to play physical. That’s what Coach wants from me, because it makes space for other people. I play with two very skilled players. If I can get open, they’ll find me.

“To get guys like myself involved, who aren’t going to score a lot, gives us that much more depth.”

There’s the word again. Depth. And after Turano’s goal, Dennis Packard was Depth personified.

Packard finished with a hat trick—“My first since pee-wees,” he said—that came as a surprise to the 1,522 at Bright Hockey Center, since a three-goal outing is something that usually happens in these parts only on nights when Moore’s slap shot has a little extra sauce on it.

But Pac-Man was looking an awful lot like Super Mario on Friday, and even Lemieux could’ve been proud of the results.

Packard used his 6’5, 225-pound frame to rush the net and hammer home a feed from Nowak at 14:11 of the second, score a breakaway goal and complete the trickery in the third to give the Crimson a critical insurance goal.

Like Turano, Packard is only now shaking off the effects of an injury–in his case, a broken hand.

“I’ve been building up my strength,” said Packard, who entered the weekend with 11 points but was a 20-point man last year. “It’s finally feeling good now.”

That seems to be a blanket statement for Harvard’s offense. After all, Packard and Turano weren’t alone last weekend.

With sophomore winger Brendan Bernakevitch out both games (hip) and junior Tyler Kolarik gone after the second period of Game 1 (shoulder), Mazzoleni was forced to adjust on the fly, double-shifting both Fried and Turano and changing his lines so often on Friday night you would’ve thought he had a Powerball hopper behind the bench. (‘OK, we’ve got 7…and 17…and 12. That’s Fried-Moore-Turano!’)

Without Kolarik in Game 2, Harvard’s depth was even more critical. Senior fourth-liner Aaron Kim assisted on a goal by Fried, while sophomore Rob Flynn played well in place of Kolarik on the top line. Murphy moved up from the fourth line and kept up with Pettit and Cavanagh, exchanging tape-to-tape passes with the Crimson’s great playmaking pair, and Johnson played one of his best games yet, scoring on a one-timer from Moore in the first.

“I tell you, Charlie Johnson is going to be one heck of a player,” Moore said.

It might not be an exaggeration to take Moore’s statement a step further and say that Johnson already is—along with Turano, Packard, Fried, Murphy and the others who are, in the words of Mazzoleni, “guys you don’t usually see on the score sheet.”

And as John Ronan would tell you, what “usually” happens isn’t always what does happen—especially not at this time of year.

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