All throughout the young season and its preceding months, Harvard men’s hockey coach Ted Donato ’91 had sworn his team just needed a little time.

Just a little time for the half-dozen-or-so starting freshmen to get the hang of things.

Just a little time for the pieces of a new coaching staff, a veteran defensive corps, and a young, upstart offense to fall into place.

Just give it a little time, Donato said, and the Crimson would pose a legitimate threat.

“I think, as a coach, I believed in what we were trying to do and what we were trying to establish,” Donato said.

It’s easy to say after a 21-win season that saw Harvard earn its fourth consecutive berth in the NCAA tournament, but could Donato have really believed that a Nov. 16 contest against then-No. 1 Boston College would be the Crimson’s coming-out party?

It certainly wasn’t supposed to happen. Not by a long shot.

Though the season was still young, Boston College had already beaten powerhouses like North Dakota, Maine, Denver, and UMass-Lowell.

Harvard, meanwhile, owned a middling 2-2-1 record after wresting a pair of victories from perpetual cellar-dwellers Yale and Princeton.

And when the Eagles stormed the Crimson zone and beat Harvard netminder Dov Grumet-Morris just 62 seconds into the game, well, that was supposed to happen, right?

Boston College was tops in the country, and the Crimson was miles from spitting distance of the rankings.

“We knew we were the underdogs,” freshman forward Jon Pelle said. “[But] every guy in that locker room believed that we could win. We knew that probably everyone outside the room didn’t think so, but we believed it.”

And if anybody was ready to disprove the world that loomed outside the locker room, it was Pelle, who had a hand in all three of Harvard’s unanswered goals.

Charitable as his 5’8 listing was, Pelle had slipped past an Eagles defense that ranged from 5’11 to 6’4 all night long, positioning himself in just the right spot at every opportunity.

“It was still early in the season,” said senior winger Andrew Lederman, “and we still had that young blood in us. Especially with the young guys, I think it was their energy—I think we not only matched, but surpassed [Boston College’s] energy.”