ALBANY, N.Y.—It came full circle Saturday night.

Same championship game. Same end of the ice. Same time remaining.

But so delectably different.

Almost one year to the day the ECAC championship slipped through the skates of Harvard’s icemen on a draw play, here they were again at Pepsi Arena, lining up with about 30 seconds remaining and the league title at stake.

But this time, there was no disappointment. Only euphoria.

Kenny Smith, the Crimson captain benched twice during the regular season, wristed in a clean faceoff win by tournament most outstanding player Brendan Bernakevitch under the crossbar, delivering Harvard’s seventh ECAC title with a pulsating, come-from-behind 4-2 win over ninth-seeded Clarkson.

“Last year hurt so much,” Smith remembered. “But there is no better feeling than this.”

Harvard, 9-1-1 in its last 11 games and 18-14-3 overall, returns to Albany for an NCAA East Regional game against Hockey East champion Maine (30-7-3) at 5 p.m. Friday. The winner faces either Ohio State or Wisconsin for a ticket to the Frozen Four at Boston’s FleetCenter.

This is the Crimson’s third consecutive NCAA appearance, the program’s longest such streak since reaching five straight from 1985-1989. Harvard is one of only five teams to make the last three NCAA tournaments. The others are Maine, Michigan, New Hampshire and Minnesota.

All of this—the ECAC title, an NCAA berth, success in general—seemed such a distant possibility for the Crimson a month ago, when the team was performing well below preseason expectations at 9-13-2.

But Harvard remade itself at the outset of the ECAC tournament with sweeps of Vermont and Brown before squeezing out a 2-1 semifinal victory over Dartmouth. And on Saturday arrived a second Whitelaw Cup in a three-year span for the first time in school history.

Fitting that this transpired in Albany, where almost exactly six months ago the Crimson was tabbed as the overwhelming favorite at ECAC media day.

That announcement was the relative high point of the regular season in which Harvard finished sixth, a disappointing winter in every respect. And the only thing that could rectify that was in Smith’s hands by the end of the night.

“These guys deserve a championship,” he said, smiling, as his teammates filed off the ice. “We didn’t live up to our expectations, but we kept working. We knew things would go our way.

“We stuck together. Now we get the Cup.”