When a team scores as many goals as Maine tends to, it’s bound to get a strange one every now and then.<\/p>\n
And whether due to the law of averages, luck or their lethal power play, the Black Bears got that goal — the game-winner, in fact — to beat Harvard, 4-2, on Sunday afternoon before 6,894 at the Cumberland County Civic Center.<\/p>\n
Buzzing around the ice as it did throughout the game, Maine pressured the Crimson into taking two first-period penalties 16 seconds apart, the latter coming at 14:30.<\/p>\n
With the Black Bears already leading 2-0 and sporting the nation’s sixth-best power play (26 percent efficiency), the outcome appeared to be academic. And it was. Just not in the most conventional way.<\/p>\n
Maine won an offensive draw to begin the sequence and almost immediately threw a shot on net. In the ensuing scramble for the rebound, Harvard captain Dominic Moore had his stick chopped in half.<\/p>\n
The count: three skaters, two sticks.<\/p>\n
“After that, I was just trying to stay in their passing lanes, stay compact,” Moore said. “Bad luck on that play.”<\/p>\n
The puck went behind the net. Crimson goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris slid to his right to stop Martin Kariya’s wrap-around try, and Kariya knocked his stick away as he crashed the net. Defenseman Ryan Lannon gave his stick to Grumet-Morris.<\/p>\n
The count: three skaters, one stick.<\/p>\n
“Out on a five-on-three, minus two sticks,” Grumet-Morris said, “that’s a tough situation.”<\/p>\n
By that time, the situation may have already moved from “tough” to “hopeless,” since fully-equipped teams have had trouble stopping the Black Bears this season.<\/p>\n
Grumet-Morris was able to stop one shot after that — with his leg, not Lannon’s stick — but the puck soon came out to Maine’s Colin Shields at the left point. Sheilds’ eyes undoubtedly got as wide as the puck, which he promptly blasted past Grumet-Morris and Lannon, who were falling over one another in a feeble attempt to get in front of the shot.<\/p>\n
Frustrated, Grumet-Morris tossed Lannon’s stick aside.<\/p>\n
The count: Maine 3, Harvard 0.<\/p>\n
“That was a crazy goal,” said Maine coach Tim Whitehead, whose second-ranked team is now 13-1-2. “I don’t know when you’re going to see that again.”<\/p>\n
The Crimson outscored (2-1) and outshot (21-17) its host the rest of the game, but in the end it was the Black Bears’ three goals in the game’s first 15:03 — two on the power play — that made the difference.<\/p>\n
“We knew coming in how good their power play was,” said Harvard coach Mark Mazzoleni. “So when you take five penalties in the first period and they pop two power-play goals, that’s tough to come back from. We dug ourselves a major hole.<\/p>\n
“But I like the way we competed. From the second period on, it was a 2-1 game. But that’s the second period on. You have to play three periods to win a hockey game.”<\/p>\n
Whitehead, on the other hand, had a feeling his team would come out strong from the beginning. <\/p>\n
“The guys have been looking forward to this one for awhile,” Whitehead said. “We have a lot of respect for Harvard, and we played them in the NCAA tournament last year. And we only get to play down here in Portland once a year, so it’s very important that we put on a good showing while we’re here.”<\/p>\n
The Black Bears showed especially well in the early going, taking a 1-0 lead just 45 seconds into the game on Shields’s first of the afternoon before moving ahead 2-0 at 9:31 on a goal from Kariya. After Shields took advantage of the short-sticked Harvard penalty kill, Maine had a three-goal lead after the first.<\/p>\n
“I really liked that first period,” Whitehead said. “We kept the pressure on them, and that was the key. Sometimes you score a very early one like that and tend to disarm a little, but I didn’t feel we reacted that way. We continued to play hard.”<\/p>\n
The Crimson drew to 3-1 with 9:54 left in an evenly-played second period on Kenny Turano’s first goal of the season, a one-timer from the slot off an assist from Tom Cavanagh.<\/p>\n
Turano, who had not played since Nov. 29, was in the lineup in place of junior Dennis Packard, out indefinitely with a hand injury.<\/p>\n
“He gave us a big spark,” Mazzoleni said of Turano, who broke his finger later in the game. “We needed it at that point.”<\/p>\n
But Maine, whose only loss came to third-ranked Colorado College on Oct. 18, went back up by three goals about four minutes later, when Francis Nault’s shot from the left point beat the butterflying Grumet-Morris.<\/p>\n
Harvard, though, kept skating stride-for-stride with the Black Bears and cut the lead to 4-2 when Moore skated across the blue line and tucked a wrister underneath the crossbar at 5:23 of the third. The Crimson had ‘Grade A’ chances down the stretch, but World Juniors-bound Jimmy Howard (32 saves) turned aside every one of them.<\/p>\n
Harvard, which lost for the first time six games, received an equal number of saves from Grumet-Morris.<\/p>\n
“I thought they both played fantastic,” Whitehead said of the goaltenders. “There was a lot of up-and-down play.”<\/p>\n
Up next for Maine is the marquee game of this season’s batch of holiday tournaments, a showdown with No. 4 Cornell at the Everblades College Classic.<\/p>\n
“That game’s going to be similar to what we saw tonight,” Whitehead said. “Cornell is a big, physical team that plays hard, much like Harvard. So it’s not going to get any easier.<\/p>\n
“But it will get a little warmer,” Whitehead said with a smile, referring to the tournament’s location in Estero, Fla. “We’re working our way south. First Portland, then Florida.”<\/p>\n
Harvard (9-4-1) will also play a ranked opponent in its next game, No. 14 Northern Michigan, as part of the Bank One Badger Showdown in Milwaukee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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