Harvard hockey captain Pete Hafner is as mild-mannered as he is tall, and so the sight of the 6’5 defenseman fuming after last Friday’s 5-1 ECAC quarterfinal loss to St. Lawrence was very nearly unbelievable.

“I was pretty much shocked at the way we came out and started that game, knowing how important it is,” he said of the Crimson’s four-shot first period, after which the squad trailed 2-0. “You guys are already thinking about all that NCAA talk, but frankly, it was embarrassing the way we came out and started that game.”

That defeat put Harvard down 1-0 in its best-of-three series with the Saints. One more loss would not only bounce the Crimson from the league tournament, but it would virtually eliminate Harvard from the NCAA bracket. And then there was the fact that the series was held on Harvard’s home ice, while St. Lawrence had made the seven-hour drive to Cambridge. And the fact that the Crimson had just enjoyed a first-round bye, while the Saints’ series with Brown had stretched to three games, two of which involved overtime.

All these things led to one very frank captain.

“You can call it rust,” Hafner answered one question. “I think we just didn’t come out and have the work ethic we needed. For one reason or another, they seemed to want it more in the first period, and I don’t know why.”

But then something changed. Down 2-1 in Saturday’s final period, the Crimson scratched out two goals for the victory and then ran away with Sunday’s game 8-4.

With the come-from-behind series win, Harvard clinched its sixth straight berth in the ECAC tournament’s final weekend, but from here on out, the road is paved with single-elimination games. This Friday’s 4:30 p.m. semifinal against Dartmouth, Saturday’s possible championship game, the first round of NCAAs—all of these are ‘win or go home,’ as they say.

There won’t be time for a slow start or a game of “catch-up hockey,” which coach Ted Donato ’91 so often calls “losing hockey.”

He was as critical as Hafner after Friday’s loss, explaining that “in my estimation, it wasn’t an X and O’s scenario after the first period—it was more [a question] of a willingness to compete.”

Even without the ECAC tournament title, Donato’s team is all but assured a spot in the NCAA tournament, thanks in large part to the Crimson’s out-of-conference play. Wins over nationally ranked foes North Dakota, New Hampshire, Boston College, and Cornell—all of which came on the road—gave credibility to a squad few believed would recover after the graduation of last year’s stars.

But just the same, there were contests in which Harvard was undeniably flat: a 5-2 loss to Quinnipiac at the start of the season, a 4-3 loss to Yale in early December, and a miserable trip to Union and Rensselaer just after the New Year.

Harvard has not lost two consecutive games all season. Whenever the Crimson falls, no matter how miserably, it manages to pick itself up again, and that is a statistic of which the squad should be proud. This year’s version of Harvard hockey has not known any slumps.

But from here on out, “there are no second chances,” Donato said. “It’s one and out.”

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