Freshman attacker Margaret Purce has been a force offensively for the Harvard women’s soccer team in her rookie campaign. Purce currently leads the team and is second in the league with eight goals..

Harvard (8-3-1, Ivy 4-0) propelled itself past the Bears on Saturday afternoon at Soldiers Field in a 3-1 victory, its fourth straight win in the Ivy conference.

But the Crimson started slow. Brown led the way with a quick goal six minutes into the first half.

“They’re a good team, so they took advantage of our mistakes,” freshman forward Joan Fleischman said.

Co-captain midfielder Peyton Johnson called the early goal a good lesson.

“Getting scored on early is always tough, and it’s a really good learning experience for us to hopefully not have that happen again and learn that when we’re in that situation, we are able to come back,” Johnson said.

But the team did not change its general strategy or lose its composure in reaction to Brown’s goal.

“We wanted to keep it simple,” Johnson said. “We didn’t want to overthink it or get wrapped up in any one moment. We wanted to make sure we continued to do the things we’d worked on in practice and focus on ourselves.”

With 25:45 seconds to go in the first half, freshman forward Midge Purce sent a free kick into the box, and sophomore midfielder Haley Washburn finished it off with a header straight into the top of the net to tie things up.

The Crimson and the Bears remained tied for the rest of the first half. Notable shots came from a side-post shot by co-captain Elizabeth Weisman and a bicycle kick from Purce snatched out of the air by Brown’s goalie wih seven minutes to go,

“We ended the first half knowing that we’d had a lot of really good chances and knowing that if we just kept playing our game and doing what we had been doing for another 45 [minutes], we’d get the results we wanted,” Johnson said.

But the Crimson would not be content with a tie.

“It was good that we tied it up, but we knew that that wasn’t enough and we had to come out stronger than we had before and focus on this [second] 45 minutes and not on anything else,” Fleischman said.

Purce, assisted by Fleischman, scored a goal right off the bat in the second half, only to be called offsides. But the setback did not deter Harvard from piling on the pressure.

“It showed that we weren’t going to be content with a tie, and we were going to keep going after them,” Fleischman said. “Even though that one [goal] got called back it really motivated us to go for the second and third.”

About 11 minutes into the second half, the Crimson found the back of the net again. Junior midfielder Marie Margolius put in another header off an assist from sophomore defender Alika Keene.