But the positives for the Crimson ended there, as the Big Green took a close game and blew it wide open.
Dartmouth pushed its lead back up to two with 4:45 to go in the second. Robinson, who recorded the first three points of his collegiate career, skated in on a breakaway. Carroll saved the initial shot, but Nick Walsh swooped in and batted the rebound into the open left side of the net.
The Big Green poured it on in the third, starting with Walsh’s second goal of the game with 17:54 to play. The tally, which beat a diving Carroll, came right after Harvard had successfully killed off a long 5-on-3 penalty.
“They’re a team that, once they get on top of you, and you have to take some chances or you take penalties, they can stretch the game out on you,” Donato said. “They have a veteran team with a lot of scoring, and they’re a very talented group.”
With just under nine minutes to play, rookie Matt Lindblad brought the score to 6-2 with a power-play tally from the right side.
“They’re too good a hockey team to give 10 penalties, 10 power plays to,” Donato said. “I think in the first half of the game when the game was in the balance, we did a pretty good job killing penalties, but I think it also wore our guys down. They were tired.”
Carroll was then pulled for rookie Raphael Girard, who made his collegiate debut.
But Girard struggled just as much as his senior counterparts, allowing a pair of goals to the Walsh brothers. Sophomore Dustin Walsh put a shot over Girard’s extended leg with five minutes left on the clock, and Nick Walsh finished his hat trick on the power play in the game’s final two minutes.
Dartmouth outshot Harvard for the game, 45-27. The Crimson has a chance to right the ship against the Big Green in the second half of the home-and-home series tonight in Hanover.
“Certainly we’d like to have a better effort, and we feel good about our group,” Donato said. “But it’s not as easy to feel that way after tonight’s performance.”
—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.