After receiving the ECAC regular season championship trophy from league commissioner Phil Buttafuoco on senior day, the No. 2 Harvard women’s hockey team skated awkwardly in celebration, unsure of what to do with the golden cup.

Though the Crimson relished capturing the cup for only the third time in program history on home ice, the team has its eyes set on a bigger prize in Providence, R.I. come the fourth weekend of March.

“This is just hopefully our first of many championships [this season],” co-captain Lauren McAuliffe said after the title-clinching victory over Princeton. “We’ve got to work on our celebration a bit. But we’re ready to go. We’re just starting.”

Top-seeded Harvard (25-3-1, 15-3-0 ECAC) begins its quest for a national championship in the ECAC playoff tournament against eight-seeded Cornell (7-19-2, 3-15-0) in a best two-out-of-three series this weekend.

Despite outscoring the Big Red 14-3 in two games during the regular season, the Crimson has learned not to take any team lightly.

“From here on out, we have to play every game like it’s a championship game,” Harvard coach Katey Stone said. “We have to win one game to get to the next and then to the next.”

Harvard has certainly had its taste of the playoffs atmosphere in recent games.

Since mid-February, Harvard has eked two overtime wins, scored a goal with seven seconds left to pick up another victory over Yale and fell in a down to the wire one-goal loss against rival No. 3 Dartmouth on the road.

“We learned how to play in playoff type atmosphere,” Ruggiero said. “Now, it’s the real home stretch.”

Unlike years past, the Crimson has fought through a number of tight contests all year.  But similar to the dominating teams of old, Harvard found a way to win more often than not, having dropped only three games all year long.

“I think we’re the most prepared we’ve ever been,” Ruggiero said.  “Last year, we won 7-1, but this year more games were like 1-0, 2-1—it’s been down to the wire.”

After two tight victories this past weekend over Yale and Princeton, the Crimson began this week to refocus its efforts for the final stretch.

“We took a couple of days off, and now it’s a whole new season,” Stone said.

If the regular season is any indication, the Big Red looks as if it will be overmatched on the ice this weekend. In the last game of the season, Cornell squeaked out a 2-1 overtime victory over Vermont to take the last playoff spot.

The win was only Cornell’s third conference victory of the season.

On the other hand, Harvard comes into the playoffs having only lost three games against ECAC opponents out of 18 games played—two of which the Crimson dropped to the third-seeded Big Green.

Perhaps the most striking discrepancy between Harvard and Cornell is their offensive statistics over the course of the season.

While Ruggiero, junior winger Nicole Corriero, and sophomore Julie Chu all finished in the top 10 in scoring, Cornell has only a single player in the top 100—Jen Munhofen at No. 95.

Harvard’s conference crown also puts it in prime position in the tournament to reach the championship game.

Whereas the Crimson would face the winner of the Brown-Princeton series with a win over Cornell, Dartmouth and fellow conference powerhouse No. 4 St. Lawrence would square off to decide who faces Harvard for the crown and an all but assured spot in the Frozen Four as conference champion—assuming both avoid upsets in previous rounds.

This time they will be looking to follow through and bring the Crimson its first national title since Ruggiero’s freshman year in 1999.  In fact, Ruggiero is the only remaining player to have tasted that glory, and leaving her collegiate career on top is her ultimate goal.

“It would mean everything to go out of this place wearing a ring on my finger from this year,” Ruggiero said.  “What athlete does not want to leave on top?”

All of the players who returned from last year’s team know that it will take a lot more form this point to finish the season with that ring secured.  One year ago, Harvard finished atop the ECAC in the regular season only to fall to Dartmouth in the tournament championship bout.

Now that this year’s players have tasted the first successes of the season, they are hungry for more.

Harvard first faces off today at 7 p.m. at the Bright Hockey Center.  The series continues tomorrow at 4 p.m. and Sunday at the same time, if necessary.

—Staff writer John R. Hein can be reached at hein@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Gabriel M. Velez can be reached at gmvelez@fas.harvard.edu.