“To be perfectly honest,” Donato said later, responding to reporters, “[the double-overtime] was a factor. How could it not be a factor?”
But, the coach added, “They outplayed us tonight. Last night was last night.”
And so the Whitelaw Trophy has changed hands for another year. Harvard took the championship game from Cornell in 2002, while the Big Red won it from the Crimson in 2003. Last year, Harvard won it from Clarkson, and this year, it will return to Ithaca, N.Y., again.
Said Donato, simply, “We were outplayed. I think they deserved to win.”
“Sometimes, at the end of the game,” he added, “you’ve just got to take your hat off and say, ‘hey, we got outplayed,’ and I think that was the case tonight.”
—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.