Junior Kalley Armstrong netted 11 goals en route to the NCAA tournament. The Crimson lost to BC in the quarterfinal round.

Going into the season without injured would-be starting defenders senior Josephine Pucci and junior Marissa Gedman, the Harvard women’s hockey team faced major question marks.

But the Crimson got as good a start as it could have hoped for and never looked back.

“Doing what we weren’t expected to do was probably the best part of the whole experience,” junior forward Lyndsey Fry said.

In the span of nine days, Harvard swept four conference opponents on the road by a combined score of 18-1. The Crimson would ride the hot streak to an 18-1-1 start.

“You just got to keep grinding and hope it works out,” co-captain forward Jillian Dempsey said of the long season.

When the Crimson returned to Bright Hockey Center, it took down eventual ECAC champion Cornell.

“The most rewarding thing was, as an upperclassman, finally beating teams like Boston University and Cornell,” Fry said. “In my time here we’ve never won big games like that against top teams.”

While Harvard fell short of accomplishing its ultimate goal of winning the national championship, the Crimson’s season was interspersed with plenty of high notes, including its first Ivy League title since 2009, a playoff run in the ECAC, and a No. 2 spot in the national rankings at one point during the year.

“The fact that we pulled together with what we had was unbelievable,” Fry said. “The people that needed to step up stepped up.”

In the ECAC postseason’s final weekend, Harvard avenged its lone home loss against Clarkson in the semifinals before falling to a Cornell side that benefitted from playing on its home ice.

“To finally get that win [against Clarkson] at the opportune moment was pretty clutch and amazing,” Dempsey said.

The semifinal victory, a response to a disappointing Senior Day, was impressive enough to earn the Crimson a spot in the NCAA tournament.

The underdogs bowed out in the quarterfinals, falling 3-1 to Boston College.

“All of us in our hearts believed we could have won that game,” said Fry of the game that brought the Crimson’s season to a premature halt. “We just didn’t show up that day.”

The squad owes a large part of its success this season to the goaltending duo of freshman standout, Emerance Maschmeyer, and outgoing co-captain Laura Bellamy.