The banners at Harvard’s Bright-Landry Hockey Center tell stories of tribute to the champions of years past.
They form a road of sorts along the ice sheet, and each flag links generations of hockey players who once wore the fabled crimson and white uniforms by listing the individual years’ glory next to one another.
It’s a common practice employed around the country, but the presentation of those years specifically offers a unique embarrassment of riches for the Crimson’s hockey history
As defending ECAC Hockey champions, last Friday night’s season opener started Harvard’s hopeful road towards listing another year on the postseason banners, but when the puck dropped against Dartmouth, the Crimson simultaneously started both a title defense and a yearning charge for a championship race that bubbles under the surface of the more obvious college hockey discussion.
It was the first game of the team’s Ivy League season subset, and for the players and coaches of the six schools involved in that race, the critical subplot remains an integral piece of why games between college hockey’s Original Six still matter, even as the half-dozen schools start their college hockey season almost a full month after the remainder of the sport’s programs.
“You get so excited for that season to start,” said Harvard coach Ted Donato. “You pay attention to what’s going on, and I think, in some ways, you enjoy the fact that your stress level isn’t turned up to the max just yet. But as a coach, you sit there and watch to see how teams are playing or which teams are doing well or not doing well. It sometimes gives you ideas of how they run a four-on-three or six-on-four, or situations that we haven’t practiced, like defending with five minutes to go in the game.”
The Ivies have always had a place in the college hockey discussion, but the historic universities represent the roots of the sport’s oldest days. Five of the six schools that still sponsor the sport are the oldest Division I hockey programs ever founded, having begun play before or at the turn of the 20th century.
They remain one of the most continuous pieces of the sport’s conversation, and with the exception of Penn, which sponsored the sport for a decade before cutting the program in the late-1970s, they’ve always managed to stay together as a concrete, indivisible unit. They helped found the ECAC Hockey when it was a loose conglomerate of hockey-playing schools and later formed one of the three divisions when the formal conference split and reorganized.
The Ivy League has always stayed together, and after the East Division broke away in the 1980s to form Hockey East, it merged with ECAC Hockey’s West Division before evolving into the league more recognized as part of today’s modern game.
Through it all, the league crowned its own internal champion, and even though bigger prizes are awarded at the ECAC Hockey and national levels, earning an Ivy League championship reverberates through historic institutions that compete against one another at an elite academic and athletic level.
Harvard, for example, entered last year’s late-season weekend series at home against Princeton and Quinnipiac barely needing points to clinch a first-round bye. The third place Crimson were nine points clear of fifth place Colgate and 10 points behind league-leading Quinnipiac with a handful of games remaining, and it was unlikely that anything other than seeding would be determined by their last few weekends.
Princeton was a full 11 points behind the Crimson while battling for home ice in the first round of the ECAC Hockey postseason, but the Tigers remained very much within striking distance of an Ivy League subset championship with a 5-1 record. They had been undefeated before losing to Dartmouth four days earlier, but with four of their last six games against Ivy League competition, including two against a Harvard team that was 6-1-1 against the other six schools, the informal championship very much remained in doubt.
That Friday night game subsequently felt like a playoff game, and after the Tigers scored twice in the first period, Harvard roared back with four unanswered goals to take a 4-2 lead before the halfway point of the third period. Princeton, undaunted, scored again with a little less than nine minutes remaining, but the Crimson held onto a 4-3 win and eventually clinched their 24th Ivy League championship and first since 2017 with an 8-1-1 overall record after beating Princeton in a rematch on the final day of the season.
“I just think the rivalries are so strong that those games are super important,” said Donato. “The players realize that these are programs that have the same expectations as student-athletes, and the reality is that we have other sports that only play for an Ivy League title. So amongst their peers, when it’s an Ivy League game, it’s really important. It means something. Our biggest rival is Cornell, and that’s because there’s such a great tradition of the two programs meeting up for some important games [because] there’s certainly something special about those Ivy League matchups.”
This past weekend, the drive in earnest for those six schools began again when everyone except for Cornell played one another. Harvard swept Dartmouth and Princeton at home while Brown split with Yale. This weekend, the Bears head to Harvard and Dartmouth while Princeton hosts Cornell as part of a weekend that includes Colgate.
Next weekend, the Tigers head to Yale and Brown before the Big Red host the Bulldogs and Bears on Nov. 19-19, and Cornell later hosts Harvard and Dartmouth in early December in a typical round robin that allows for the teams to play one another in the early stages of the season.
“You’ll always learn a lot about your team in the first handful of games,” said Donato. “Somebody is poised to make another step as a player that you haven’t seen yet in a game, and a lot of stuff gets ironed out in the first four or five games. For us, we just can’t wait to play someone else.
“We were entirely sick of playing [internally] against one another, and we’re fortunate that our first several games [include] games within the Ivy League, so we’re playing against teams that are in a similar situation.”
Harvard’s games this weekend are both scheduled for 7 p.m. with Brown playing in the front end before Yale arrives at Bright-Landry Hockey Center on Saturday.
