Junior Liza Ryabkina scored three goals over the weekend as Harvard swept Princeton in the ECAC quarterfinals.

It might have been the shot heard ’round the ECAC when junior Kate Buesser rifled the puck past the entire Princeton defense and goalie Rachel Weber from just past the blue line. But shortly into the second period, it was clear that the No. 4 Harvard women’s hockey team (20-6-5) had more than one gun in its arsenal as it fired its way to a 4-1 victory over the Tigers—and a sweep of the ECAC quarterfinals—Saturday afternoon at Bright Hockey Center.

Princeton (13-14-4) came out hard early in a game of possession scrambles and physical hockey. But while the Tigers’ hits mainly came on opposing players, the Crimson directed its aggression towards the puck, outshooting its opponent, 14-2, in the first period.

“It was a physical weekend, no question,” Harvard coach Katey Stone said. “But, you know, I like how our kids weathered the storm when there was a little bit of pressure put on them. They turned it right back on Princeton.”

But the Tigers’ physicality prevented the Crimson from getting clean shots off close to the net and stumped Harvard for the first eight minutes of the game. Unable to move the puck past a wall of black and orange, freshman Josephine Pucci fired the puck to the top of the zone where Buesser waited unguarded.

The junior fired the puck through a crowd of Tigers to put the Crimson up by one.

That shot opened up the floodgates. The forward’s goal gave Princeton no choice but to cover Harvard’s forwards across the ice, which opened up the ice around the cage for future Crimson infiltrations.

But before Harvard ran up the score, it had to kill two first-period penalties. The Crimson used its speed to pressure the Tigers and hold them scoreless on the power play.

“It’s easy to kill a penalty when your two forwards are in there forechecking and they can’t even get it out of the zone,” co-captain Kathryn Farni said. “So they make our job easier. If the puck does get in our end, we have a lot of energy to go forecheck.”

“We did a nice job getting in lanes,” Stone added. “More importantly, when there was a puck in front of the net, we cleared it well.”

When the Crimson had all five skaters on the ice, Princeton seemed bewildered, as Harvard kept finding creative ways to put the puck in the net.

“That makes coaches feel really good, because then you’re hard to scout, you’re hard to play against,” Stone said.

Fifteen minutes of ice time after Buesser scored with raw power, freshman Kaitlin Spurling added her own flair to the game, backhanding the puck into the goal shortly after senior Anna McDonald’s rush had offset the Tiger defense.

“We really got into the thick of it down at their end and in the trenches and scored some good and ugly goals as a result of it,” Stone said.

Despite Stone’s characterization, nearly all of the Crimson’s goals came cleanly. Less than three minutes after Spurling’s score, junior Liza Ryabkina solved Weber for her third goal of the weekend. Once again, Pucci was there to get the puck to her upperclassman teammate, sending the puck across the zone, where Ryabkina had an open look.

“It was big for us to come out strong in the second,” senior Randi Griffin said. “At that point in the game, it could have gone either way. If they had gotten a lucky break or gotten a goal or something, they would be so pumped, because for them the season was really on the line.”