Senior winger Tyler Kolarik (16) and junior Tom Cavanagh (9) assisted on senior Tim Pettit’s goal Friday night against Cornell. The tally cut into a 3-0 Big Red deficit before Cornell responded just 36 seconds later.

In 1923, Grantland Rice, the dean of American sportswriters, wrote a poem entitled “Alumnus Football,” and from this poem the mother of all sports clichés was born.

Rice wrote: “When the Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”

But in the case of the Harvard men’s hockey team, the more accurate assessment is in how long the team plays the game.

Friday night against Cornell, the Crimson played 40 or so minutes of hockey, falling behind 3-0 before rallying to make the game close. This year’s contest was eerily similar to last season’s encounter with the Big Red at Bright Hockey Center when Harvard gave up two power-play goals in the first five minutes and spotted Cornell a 3-0 lead before the opening period was half over.

“That’s the way you gotta play to beat them, you gotta play three periods,” Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni said after last year’s loss. “You can’t play two periods, and you can’t spot two power-play goals. You do that and you don’t deserve to win, and we didn’t deserve to win.”

Compare that to Mazzoleni’s post-game thoughts this season.

“To win a hockey game against a quality hockey team like [Cornell], you’ve got to play 60 minutes, and we didn’t play 60 minutes.

“That’s a clear indication of why we’re struggling right now—because we don’t bring it for 60 minutes.”

Look awfully similar, don’t they?

Cornell’s coach Mike Schafer noticed the pattern, saying that there were “different teams, but the same kind of game.”

There is one major difference though: last year’s game was an aberration for the Crimson. Apart from a handful of contests last season, Harvard played the full 60 minutes of hockey every night. This season, that has been the exception and not the rule. The Crimson has suffered a number of losses to less-talented teams, including a 3-0 loss to Clarkson at home, a 4-1 face-first fall at RPI, and a season-sweep by Princeton.

At roughly equal points in the schedule (the second week of January), the difference between the 2002-2003 Crimson and this season’s incarnation is striking. Harvard stood 11-3 in conference play a year ago; this year the team is struggling to stay afloat in the ECAC at 6-7-1. Last year’s team was neck-and-neck with Cornell for the top seed in the playoffs; this year’s squad is hoping to have home ice in the first round.

And the reason, ultimately, lies in how long Harvard plays each game. It’s not really a question of how Harvard plays; even ugly games like a 3-3 tie against Clarkson, a back-and-forth 2-2 tie versus Dartmouth and one-goal losses at Boston College and Cornell have shown the intensity Harvard is capable of competing with.

Friday night against Cornell, Harvard played hard over the game’s final 40 minutes, outshooting the Big Red, 23-12. But that was only after Cornell held a 10-4 shot advantage in the first.

That pattern—not being ready to play from the drop of the puck—is a “clear illustration” of the team’s struggles this season, according to Mazzoleni.