“We just had a bad day, just had a bad game,” Lane MacDonald ’88-’89 said. “We were extremely disappointed.

To this day, Chiarelli remembers sitting down in that locker room, disappointed, having lost his final college game.

“I think I might have just [told] a few of the guys that they should be proud,” Chiarelli recalled. “It was really disappointing. We started the year 18-0 or something like that, we were ranked No. 1 for most of the year, and I thought we were going to win it. It was really disappointing that we didn’t get to the final game.”

Two years after Chiarelli’s departure, a Harvard team with a number of the same players would finally get a title, and some credited the former captain with mentoring the key contributors on that team.

“We had a lot of great role models on our team who instilled a lot of lessons in us about hard work, commitment, sacrifice,” MacDonald said. “Peter certainly played a role. He was a terrific captain.”

Though Chiarelli may not have personally brought a crown to Cambridge, the experience he earned over his four years in Crimson would prove invaluable later in life. The creation of a championship team, famed coach Bill Cleary, the losses at the doorstep of greatness, and the year of leadership would all help shape Chiarelli.

“You can see the building blocks of what makes a great GM,” Carney said.

GOING BACK TO BEANTOWN

After graduating from college and spending a short time in a European hockey league, Chiarelli headed back home to Ottawa to regroup. After exploring a career in law, Chiarelli eventually joined the staff of the Ottawa Senators, his hometown team.

Sweeney accurately predicted that once Chiarelli committed himself to the business of hockey, he would rise through the ranks quickly.

“He had the former player background from a college standpoint...with the lawyer background and doing all the behind the scenes stuff with Ottawa, it should have been only a matter of time before someone recognized that he’d be a good leader,” Sweeney said.

That time came in 2006 when Chiarelli became the general manager of the Boston Bruins, and renewed his quest for an ever-elusive cup.

FINALLY A CHAMPION

After a last-place divisional finish, the same determination that helped Chiarelli re-emerge in the Crimson lineup helped him prevail on a much larger stage. Over the next five years, the Bruins won their division three times as Chiarelli put together a consistent winning team.

Then, in the 2011 playoffs, Chiarelli got the breaks that went the other way back in the ’80s. Two out of the Bruins’ first three series were decided by one-goal Game 7s. Had the outcome been different, Chiarelli might have been out of a job. Instead, he was in the finals.