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.

“This kind of win can be a springboard for us.”

But it wasn’t. The next night, Harvard played with little emotion and lost to Rensselaer, 4-1. It had 22 shots on goal, less than half Friday’s total. Three times, Crimson defenders had their pockets picked, leading directly to goals. And Grumet-Morris didn’t have one of his better games.

So there you have it: a riveting comeback win, followed by a fall-flat-on-their-faces defeat.

“It’s been Mr. Hyde of Harvard, a real Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde thing,” Mazzoleni said Saturday. “The hardest thing for us has been to put two nights together.”

Friday, Harvard showed what it can do. Denied time and time again by goaltender Kris Mayotte, the Crimson skaters persisted—and eventually triumphed.

The Pettit of old (47 points last season) returned. He skated well, played sound defense and sacrificed his body for a key blocked shot in the third period. He made a tremendous play to assist on Cavanagh’s game-tying goal, then swatted in the game-winner from the doorstep with 61 seconds left.

After scoring only one goal in his first 12 games, Pettit extended his goal-scoring streak to four games.

And he wasn’t the only one to step up. Senior Blair Barlow, who has shuttled between forward and defense all year, was very steady on the blue line. Sophomore forward Dan Murphy had three shots on goal in one of his best games at Harvard.

Kolarik was in the thick of it, too. He hasn’t scored a goal since Dec. 13, but was beaming after he and his teammates produced their greatest comeback in more than two years.

“I feel like a proud father tonight,” he said.

But Kolarik’s grin didn’t survive Saturday night.

After such strong performances Friday, Pettit’s scoring streak ended with little fanfare, Hafner and Barlow committed damning turnovers that led to goals, Kolarik was again held off the board—and Mazzoleni couldn’t shed much light on the increasingly dark situation.

“We got outworked and outcompeted,” Mazzoleni said. “It’s that simple.”

So in the end, Friday’s emotional comeback merely delayed the questions one more night: How can you guys play so well sometimes and so crummy at others? Why haven’t you swept a weekend yet this year? What the heck is going on?

“I expected our team to come out and take the next step tonight,” Mazzoleni said Saturday, “but it’s been a hurdle we have yet been able to cross.”

What more could he say? His tactics were the same Friday as they were Saturday, outside of trying (largely unsuccessfully) to pinch along the wall as the night went on against Rensselaer. He played exactly the same lineup both nights, only it generated less than half the shots on goal and not nearly the same level of emotion.

One night after winning brilliantly, his team lost nondescriptly.

So goes this year’s Harvard Hockey Shuffle: One step forward, one step back.

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