Junior Nicole Corriero, despite having at least two Gophers trying to drag her down each time she campaigned toward the net, trudged along and fired shot after shot at Minnesota goalie Jody Horak, finishing with nine shots on goal for the game.

Unfortunately, her only goal came in the second period off a Ruggiero set-up, and she wasn’t able to snap the Gophers' dominance in the final frame.

As the end of the game drew near, Harvard had more and more trouble putting together quality scoring opportunities and holding the puck deep in the Gopher's defensive zone.

"We put a lot of pressure on them down the stretch of the game—if we had been tired we probably wouldn’t have been able to do that," Stone said.

The nail in the coffin might very well have come on Wendell's goal at 6:54—Minnesota’s fifth of the game and fourth unanswered.

"We had smiles on our faces for that third period, and we never let up and enjoyed every minute of it," Halldorson said.

Darwitz rounded out the period with a hat trick with slightly less than seven minutes left in the game.

"Sometimes against a fast team, you just look like you're running around a little bit," Stone said. "We didn't make it easy on ourselves when we did put the puck in deep. We lost it at the blue line a lot of the time. Every once in awhile, we just got caught watching instead of participating."

The game's finish was a difficult and disappointing ending after the Crimson's solid start.

Although Minnesota dominated the opening minutes in the number of shots they got on Boe, the Crimson got on the board first.

Seven minutes into the game, the Gophers held a 6-1 advantage in shots—a statistical dominance that Harvard usually sees in its favor—but was simply flinging shots from wherever they had a chance as opposed to crashing the net and getting the rebounds. The latter style of play led to the third period barrage of goals for Minnesota.

Following their final practice, however, Halldorson had said that the Gophers style of play was not to simply fire away every chance they have.

"We are not the kind of team that shoots every chance we get," Halldorson said. "It’s not about sheer numbers, but we want to get to the net and create great opportunities."

But it was the Crimson who seemed to adhere to this style early on, when junior Kat Sweet sent the Harvard fans into a craze with the game’s first goal.

Right before the 13-minute mark in the first period, freshman Katie Johnston sent the puck to classmate Caitlin Cahow at the point. Cahow then fired the puck towards the right side of the net and found Sweet, who managed to get the end of her stick on the puck and jump it top shelf past Horak's left.