“Brown’s got a good power play,” Donato said. “It was dangerous coming in. We knew from [the] special teams end of it that we needed to a good job. I think our guys really battled hard.”

On a night where the defense was solid, the Harvard offense didn’t look too shabby either.

The Crimson opened the scoring in the first period when Bernakevitch carried the puck into the offensive zone and sent the puck to the left circle. Sophomore forward Ryan Maki corralled the bobbling puck and whipped it back across the ice to the slot and onto assistant captain Tom Cavanagh’s tape. With Bears goaltender Adam D’Alba out of position, Cavanagh stuffed the puck into the gaping net for Harvard’s first score at 4:09.

Despite multiple opportunities, the Crimson would not strike again until 13:33 of the second period. Junior forward Charlie Johnson skated in and one-timed the perfect pass into the net to increase Harvard’s lead to 2-0.

With that tally, the Crimson was well on its way to securing its 18th win of the season—making Donato the all-time winningest rookie coach in Harvard history.

—Staff writer Karan Lodha can be reached at klodha@fas.harvard.edu.