The first to shake off his slump was senior winger Dennis Packard. Packard, who had eight points after seven games this season but had recorded only four more entering Friday, scored the type of goal his team needs him to score: he used his 6’5, 215-pound frame to muscle his way in front and take two whacks at the net, before sending his third try into the twine.
Packard’s goal made it a two-goal game four minutes into the third. A comeback, though still unlikely, suddenly seemed plausible.
The Crimson was then given a perfect opportunity to cut into the deficit, if not tie the game, when its hustle drew successive penalties on Nate Jackson and Mike Grobe. That gave Harvard 3:03 of continuous power play time, including 57 seconds with a two-man advantage. But while the Crimson put seven shots on goal during the two power plays—including two point-blank chances by Kevin Du on a 2-on-1—none resulted in a goal. And three minutes later, when struggling stars Pettit and Kolarik were denied on a 2-on-1, it looked as if Harvard’s efforts would go for naught. Again.
But the Crimson persisted, and its third-period shooting gallery eventually overwhelmed Gartner. Harvard scored three goals—including the game-tying goal and game-winning goal—in a little over one minute.
On the 50th shot, a rebound of Tom Walsh’s point wrister, Kolarik snapped his nine-game goal-scoring drought and cut Yale’s lead to 5-4 with 7:24 left. “It’s been about a month and a half between goals,” said Kolarik, who last scored on Dec. 13 against Massachusetts. “When you catch a break and one pops like that, it’s a good feeling.”
On the 53rd shot, a re-direct of Smith’s wrister from just inside the blue line, Pettit tied it. The goal—Pettit’s seventh of the season, after scoring 17 last year—silenced the once-exuberant crowd building with a tangible sense of dread.
The foreboding lasted 31 seconds, until the 56th shot, when Welch, who called Friday’s first period “the all-time low in my hockey career,” roofed the uncovered rebound of Rob Fried’s shot from the doorstep. Harvard was ahead to stay.
“The last couple of games hadn’t been going as well for me, and my confidence was down,” said Welch, a second-team All-America last season who hadn’t scored since Dec. 27. “That was a huge goal for me.”
“I’m real proud of Noah,” Kolarik said. “He’s been down on himself more than he should. He’s his own worst critic. But he showed a lot of character by playing the kind of game he did in the second and third.
“That’s the All-American. That’s the guy we want on the ice all the time.”
The comeback was complete, and it was no accident that the big goals came from Harvard’s big players. The Crimson is 5-0-0 when Kolarik scores a goal.
“There aren’t too many teams that have very successful seasons if their top players aren’t successful,” Mazzoleni said. “They get the prime ice time, and they get the opportunities.”
Bernakevitch added an empty-netter with 1:08 remaining to seal an emotional victory that was a long time coming for Harvard, which began the season as the nation’s sixth-ranked team but had won only four of its previous 14 games.
“We faced a tremendous amount of adversity, and we had to meet that challenge if we were going to turn this thing around,” Mazzoleni said. “A lesser person, a lesser team would’ve folded.”
—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.