Junior Jason Norman gets ready to make his move. The small forward made three straight shots coming out of halftime against Princeton to help orchestrate a second-half Crimson run.

People say that if you don’t like the weather in New England, just wait a minute and it will change.

Harvard’s shooting proved equally fickle Friday night at Lavietes Pavilion, as the Crimson followed an ice-cold first-half performance with a scorching streak just after halftime before returning to its early frigidity to close out the game.

Harvard missed its first eight shots, 14 of its first 15, 17 of its first 19 and 18 of its first 21 en route to a woeful 6-29 (20.7 percent) performance in the first half.

But the Crimson seemed like a different team coming out of the break, hitting its first seven shots—including three each by junior captain and small forward Jason Norman and junior shooting guard Kevin Rogus—and nine of its first 10 over the first 7:56 of the second half.

“As poorly as we shot in the first half, the fact that we came in at halftime with single digits as opposed to double digits—and almost at five—kind of gave the guys a little bit of confidence that they could get close again,” said Harvard coach Frank Sullivan.

“They went through a stretch there, starting the latter part of the first half, when they were scoring too easily. It’s as simple as that,” said Princeton coach John Thompson III.

“We just knew we had to buckle down and get stops.”

The hot shooting disappeared just as quickly as it had blown in, however, as Harvard hit just one of its final 15 shots, a Rogus three with 5:53 to play that gave the Crimson a two-point lead at 49-47.

“We couldn’t make shots at critical points in time,” Sullivan said. “Adrenaline being what it is, I think guys were feeling good that they could do almost anything. Well, no, they couldn’t. You need to know that miracles don’t always happen.”

BALL AND SCHAEN

A large part of Harvard’s collapse down the stretch—Princeton finished the night on a 13-1 run, scoring the game’s final nine points—was due to its inability to get sophomore power forward Matt Stehle involved.

Stehle, the ninth-leading scorer and second-most accurate shooter in the Ivy League entering the night, was just 1-9 for the game and took only two second-half shots, missing them both.

“They had Stehle down,” Sullivan said. “As I said to Matt at halftime, ‘They’ve scouted you well. They’re not going for your up-fake. They’re not going to let you slice to the goal like some of the other teams have done.’ So I thought they had a real good sense of how Matt plays and I think he was real bothered by that.”

Much of the credit for neutralizing Stehle goes to Tiger Harrison Schaen.

The lanky, 6’8 freshman used his long arms to prevent Stehle from getting any clear looks in the post as Thompson alternated Schaen and classmate Luke Owings on the defensive and offensive ends of the floor, respectively, down the stretch.