Rob Fried smiled knowingly as he watched the early stages of Ryan Maki’s Harvard hockey career.

“I thought to myself, wow, this kid’s making a lot of the same mistakes I made during my freshman fall,” laughed Fried, now a senior assistant captain.

Fried sees a lot of himself in Maki, a first-year winger from Shelby Township, Mich. They are roughly the same size: Maki is 6’2, 195; Fried is 6’3, 210. Each plays the same power-forward, hard-to-the-walls game. And it took both of them time to adjust their long-limbed frames to Division I college hockey.

But from what Fried has seen recently, he’s willing to declare Maki different from himself in one big way: “He’s correcting the mistakes a lot faster than I did.”

After coming agonizingly close to his first collegiate goal countless times in his first 25 games, Maki has cracked the “G” column. Early in the third period Friday, he pounced on a misplayed puck and beat Vermont’s Travis Russell for his first career tally.

Truth be told, it wasn’t an artistically brilliant goal. But that doesn’t matter.

“I’ll take whatever I can get, you know,” Maki said in a subtle accent, easily traced to his family’s roots on Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. “I was having my fair share of chances, so I knew it was coming.”

In hockey, this business of scoring and not scoring tends to run in cycles. So after Goal No. 1, another wise senior assistant captain, Tyler Kolarik, told Maki, “Now that you’ve got one, they’ll all start falling.”

So far, Kolarik’s been proven right. Maki scored again, late in the second period of Saturday’s 4-0 win over Dartmouth.

As far as everyone in the dressing room was concerned, it was about time.

Fried recalled how Dennis Packard—another winger with size (6’5, 215)—had watched Maki from the bench one day and said, “God, I can’t believe this kid doesn’t have a goal yet. He’s been popping tons of goals in practice and getting chances in games.”

Not so anymore. “We’re all glad to see him coming on,” Fried said.

Maki, who has five points this season, played on the team’s top line against the Big Green, alongside Packard and Brendan Bernakevitch. He’s also slated to skate there Friday when Harvard opens its best-of-three ECAC playoff series with Vermont.

Not bad for a freshman who just scored his first goal.

“What’s happening now is a clear indication of the type of player he is,” said Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni. “He gets around the ice, he’s physical, and he makes plays.”