HANOVER, N.H.—Standing several meters from the visiting locker room in the bowels of Dartmouth’s Thompson Arena, Harvard coach Ted Donato ’91 spoke slowly Friday night.

His team had just lost, and it wasn’t the close, bounce-here-or-bounce-there kind of defeat after which a coach can say, “Well, we gave it our best, and things just didn’t go our way.”

Instead, it was a 5-1 drubbing that saw the Big Green dominate every aspect of the game—the kind of defeat after which Donato said, “Overall, I think I’m just disappointed that we haven’t established enough of an identity within our locker room to be able to win games in tough environments.”

Dartmouth won the races to loose pucks, the battles along the boards, and the contests of brute strength and will.

“We knew we had to be physical, and they took it to us,” Crimson captain Peter Hafner said. “It’s just something that we’ve got to learn, and you can say it all the time in the locker room before [the game], but guys have to believe it.”

The Big Green has struggled this year, racking up four consecutive conference defeats to open the season—the first a 6-2 loss to Harvard—and losing three out of four games going into Friday’s matchup. Still, during a solid week of practice, Donato said his team knew Dartmouth was more than capable of big things.

Yet there he stood Friday night, scratching his head and admitting, “I just don’t think we paid the price or did the little things.”

“I’m not sure why we were surprised,” he added.

But from the first drop of the puck, the Crimson looked surprised. The Big Green launched 43 shots on net, 33 of which came in the first two periods, and three of its five goals came off rebounds in traffic. Only eight penalties were assessed—five on Dartmouth—yet Harvard never established a rhythm highlighting its speed, which has been the team’s bread and butter in victories past.

“We really wanted to focus on getting the pucks in the corners, protecting the pucks, and not having any turnovers that results in odd-man rushes,” said Dartmouth forward Rob Pritchard, who notched the first two goals of his collegiate career in the second period.

And the Big Green did it all, though Donato said the loss had less to do with particular plays and “more to do with mental toughness, with being prepared to win, being prepared to battle.”

Thus far this season, embarrassing losses have lit fires under the Crimson skaters. Early-November defeats at the hands of Quinnipiac and Cornell were followed by a 4-0-1 run. Two of those wins and the tie came against top-15 opponents.

And then in an early-December stretch of three games in five days, Harvard lost to conference whipping boy Yale, only to down Quinnipiac and shut out then-No. 9 New Hampshire.

But the Crimson won’t play again until it travels for a pair of contests against the No. 9 University of North Dakota on Dec. 29-30.

So now, after an undoubtedly unpleasant Friday-night bus ride back from snowy Hanover, Harvard is left with 13 days to prepare for the Fighting Sioux.

Plenty of time, Hafner said wryly, to “think long and hard about this one.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.