Yet the St. Lawrence advantage did not appear on the scoreboard. Instead, it was Harvard that entered the first intermission with a 2-0 advantage, the result of a close-range rebound knocked in by assistant captain Tom Cavanagh and a deflected, power-play slapshot by captain Noah Welch exactly five minutes later.

“We got lucky the first period,” Welch said. “They could have been up 4-0 the first 10 minutes of the game.”

With 20 minutes gone, though, the Crimson held the advantage—however undeserved—and it was the team’s to lose.

And the team did just that. If Harvard had gained any momentum from its fortuitous lead, that quickly dissolved with a series of second-period penalties.

In less than 75 seconds, the Crimson sent three skaters to the sin bin—assistant captain Ryan Lannon for tripping, senior Rob Flynn for a bench minor and Welch for cross-checking.

Shortly thereafter, St. Lawrence’s T.J. Trevelyan scored, the first goal Grumet-Morris had allowed in his last 65:14 of play.

And it was this “rash of penalties” according to Grumet-Morris that did the Crimson in.

“We just couldn’t stop the bleeding,” Donato said.

By the third period, as the Saints saw more and more quality chances against Grumet-Morris, it was clear in which direction the game was headed. “In general, we lost a lot of the 1-on-1 battles,” Donato said. “We lost a lot of races to the puck, and we just didn’t play with the type of intensity and attention to detail that has been our trademark over the last four [wins].”

Finally, 3:17 into the final frame, Saints blueliner Chase Trull picked up a bouncing puck near the left circle and sent it high over Grumet-Morris to tie the game.

Drew Bagnall capped the unanswered comeback at 8:48 when he knocked in a neat cross-ice feed, and Trevelyan knocked home an empty-netter with 0.1 seconds remaining on the clock.

Grumet-Morris returned for the final tenth of a second, and he later surmised that, “in the third period, they just beat us. We lost the third period. We lost the game.”

It was a bitter end to Harvard’s four-game win streak, and it wasn’t a loss soon to be forgotten.

“Losing isn’t disappointing,” Welch said. “It’s the fact that we got outworked 95 percent of that game. We didn’t really show up tonight, so that’s kind of more disappointing than losing.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.