SCHENECTADY, N.Y.—Four minutes, 37 seconds into the third period on Friday night, it started happening again.

The game—and maybe even the season for this Harvard hockey team—began to unravel. The Crimson had carried play against Union for the first two periods and into the third, but fell behind 2-0 at that moment, when Olivier Bouchard knocked a rebound past Dov Grumet-Morris.

Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni boiled over. He leaned over the edge of the bench and began pounding the dasher, near the advertisement for Schenectady’s web site. During his impromptu act on the board-bongos, the cap on his ballpoint pen flew onto the ice—a casualty of his frustration.

Mazzoleni was, right then, the personification of Harvard’s disappointing 2003-2004 season. With his team on the verge of taking another bad loss, he was helpless. He was out of answers. There wasn’t anything to say.

He was mad. Very, very mad. And there was method to it.

Bouchard’s goal came on the power play—a power play created when Harvard senior Tim Pettit was assessed a two-minute minor for holding, even though Pettit was on the business end of A.J. Palkovich’s headlock. (As you might imagine, Mazzoleni voiced his disagreement then, too.)

Mazzoleni fumed once more before the goal was scored. On a faceoff to the right of Grumet-Morris, Mazzoleni wanted to get junior Tom Cavanagh—the team’s most reliable draw man—onto the ice. But referee Peter Torgerson ruled Cavanagh came on too late (Cavanagh later said that was the correct call) and sent him back to the bench. Mazzoleni raged. The call stood.

So with no centerman on the ice, Harvard winger Dennis Packard lined up to face off against Joel Beal before being tossed out for anticipating the drop. In went Rob Fried, now the Crimson’s third choice.

The scoring sequence was a blur: Beal won the draw, Jason Visser tipped a shot on net and Bouchard knocked in the rebound.

Goals don’t get much more agonizing than that, and it was almost as if Mazzoleni, through his protests, knew it was going to happen. And, in a way, he did.

This season, it’s safe to assume the worst for the guys in carmine. And Friday night, the horn after Bouchard’s goal sure sounded like Harvard’s death knell.

After all, the Crimson hadn’t won a game in which it trailed going into the third period since the 2002 ECAC playoffs, and hadn’t rallied from a two-goal deficit in the third to win since Dec. 29, 2001—a span of 69 games.

But both streaks snapped Friday. An inspired effort from Harvard resulted in a 23-6 third-period shot advantage—50-30 for the game—and goals from Peter Hafner, Cavanagh and Pettit to win, 3-2.

It was the kind of win a team can rally around, and—having gone 1-4-1 in its last six games—our varsity needed this one. Badly.

“I’ve been praying about it nonstop for the last month,” senior assistant captain Tyler Kolarik said. “We haven’t had a lot of things go our way. Finally, we got some...I don’t know if you would even call them breaks. We’ve just been playing so hard, night after night, and finally some things came together for us. We were determined.