After Friday’s game, Kolarik—whose goal at 15:03 was his team-leading sixth career tally in the ECAC tournament—gave the credit to his freshman linemates.

“You know those guys, they just have big hearts,” Kolarik said. “Du and Mandes are just playing the game they’ve been playing all year. Smart. Intense. Just playing their style.”

Du and Mandes have also built some chemistry over the last few weeks, which bodes well for the distant future.

“We get along real well,” Mandes, a right wing from Doylestown, Pa, said of his rapport with Du. “I don’t know, we just have a good feel for each other. I think it might be one of those things where it keeps us together for awhile.”

How about four years? In the meantime, the three freshman forwards can concentrate on a little wager. It seems Du, Mandes and Maki have a running competition to see who can scrape out the most points before the end of the year.

For all you keeping score, that’s 9 for Du, 9 for Mandes and 7 for Maki. When asked whose chances he liked after Saturday’s game, Mandes broke into an ear-to-ear grin.

“I don’t know. Du’s a sniper,” he said. “But as long as I’m playing on his line, maybe I’m going to get an assist every time he scores. We’ll see.”

For the unlucky guys who end up paying for dinner, there’s plenty of solace to be found. On the ECAC’s biggest stage, all four freshmen of the Harvard hockey team have shown they’ve arrived.

Guess what? They aren’t going anywhere any time soon.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.