But Harvard was due for one more hero before the night was out.

The game remained deadlocked well into the third, before the teams lined up for a faceoff to the right of Traylen with under a minute left. Harvard had a set play. Brendan Bernakevitch, later named tournament most outstanding player, would win the draw back to Welch—who only minutes earlier had remarked to Smith, “Why don’t one of us go out and win this game.”

Bernakevitch beat Jay Latulippe cleanly. But rather than go to Welch, the puck ricocheted off Bernakevitch’s skate to Smith.

Faced with a similar situation earlier in the postseason, Smith opted to make a back-pass to Welch—a decision for which assistant coach Sean McCann ’94 later scolded, “Don’t pass up shots from the point.”

“I had that exact message in my head right then,” Smith said.

It sure looked like it. As soon as the puck touched his stick, Smith sent it goalward, snapping it through a thicket of bodies in front. That sublime bit of stickwork sent the game-winner sailing past an unknowing Traylen to deliver a second Whitelaw Cup in three seasons for the first time in Harvard history.

“There is no better feeling than this,” Smith said, standing amid the on-ice celebration that night. “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.”

It was fitting that Smith—benched twice during the season, before posting one of the team’s highest plus/minus ratings after exams—delivered the win on his serendipitous snapper. He once typified the team’s midseason tribulation. Now and forever, he will be associated with its greatest triumph.

—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@post.harvard.edu.