You heard it. This contributor heard it. The great college-hockey community heard it. We all heard it.
 
The chants of “we want Harvard” rang out in Lynah Rink.
 
They chased away quickly the uplift felt from a hard-fought and exhilarating battle against the Saints of St. Lawrence University. St. Lawrence is the class of ECAC Hockey this season. The North Countrymen at Canton’s juncture on Route 11 climbed to the top of the conference’s standings. They have ceded little ground to any program. Union is the exception, but the Dutchmen are on a tear through the conference this season.
 
St. Lawrence has met defeat in only two conference games this season. One occurred last Saturday. Can you name the other? The poles of ECAC Hockey’s greatest rivalry are the subset of ECAC Hockey teams that have defeated St. Lawrence. Even Union settled for a tie on its own ice.
 
You sure you want Harvard?
 
The Crimson are coming to town on Friday no matter whether its presence is desired or shunned. Harvard climbed to its all-time highest ranking in the popularity contest that are the polls. Remember what Mike Shiner said in Bird Man about popularity? Well, never mind, if you do not. Harvard proceeded to lose its next three contests.
 
Those games occurred over a five-day span on the road. Hey, when your program represents Harvard University, why bother send your student-athletes to class? Opponents nearly tripled up the Crimson over that stretch run. The stumble began with a 4-0 shutout against RPI. Polls matter.
 
Harvard regained its footing last weekend with a win over a Brown team that the Lynah Faithful must remember is far better than its record. Ted Donato’s team settled for a tie in its last outing.
 
Cornell and Harvard enter this contest, the 149th of The Game, in similar situations. Neither is quite as heralded. Special teams tell this disparate tale. Harvard is the team with the most lethal power play in the nation. Check the statistics. It is true.
 
Harvard is reliant upon its power play for offense. Nearly one-third, 32.9%, of the goals that this talent-flush Crimson squad has scored have benefited from the advantage of at least one extra skater. The health of the Crimson power play is the success of its team. The recent 1-3-1 skid is a product of opponents neutralizing this advantage of the Cantabs. Harvard’s power-play unit has grown complacent in the season’s second half.
 
Harvard’s lethality on the man advantage has suffered a 47.6% setback relative to its season’s average since the Engineers shut out the then-second ranked Crimson. Harvard has been only the nation’s 38th-most dangerous team when playing on the power play since January 13. Harvard converted only once on seven opportunities last weekend.
 
The carnelian and white have little reason for confidence despite the recent decline of Harvard’s power play. The penalty kill of East Hill has floundered as of late on the ice even if it has not yielded significant statistical decline. Cornell too readily could help Harvard find its stride on the power play.
 
The North-Country pair that visited Lynah Rink last weekend made opponents pay for their infractions 16.24% of the time before they played Cornell. The Red allowed the Golden Knights to convert midway through the second period on the man advantage. Cornell ended the weekend allowing the travel partners from Potsdam and Canton to convert on 16.67% of their power-play opportunities.
 
The Red penalty killers allowed Clarkson and St. Lawrence to improve their rate of capitalizing when given a power play. Yes, perhaps Cornell’s allowing the Golden Knights and Saints to convert 0.43% more frequently is insignificant considering the small sample size of opportunities provided in one weekend and the large differences in percent that result from but slight changes.
 
Reader, you think this is needless alarmism? Consider if a skate, not a kick, directed the puck into the net against an early exposed penalty-killing unit for Cornell against St. Lawrence. Then, Cornell would have allowed the North Country to more than double its man-advantage efficiency over the course of the weekend.
 
Cornell’s penalty kill seemed lost when called into service once against Quinnipiac. Figures tease out the reality that Cornell delivered only an average penalty-killing performance against Clarkson and St. Lawrence. Average play will not defeat Harvard. Average performances do not win championships.
 
The forecheck of the Red continued to impress with its relentless assault against St. Lawrence on Saturday. The defense has its lapses at times. Clarkson would not have been able to leap out to one-goal and two-goal leads if it did not. Cornell’s defensive schemes held in check and frustrated a St. Lawrence team that systematically has dominated the neutral zone against most opponents with its penchants for two-line passes and break-out plays. The Saints grew noticeably irritated with Cornell’s suffocation of that sustenance of their offense.
 
Friday presents Paddy with another opportunity to shine and prove that he is ECAC Hockey’s best blueliner. Harvard’s freshman defenseman, Adam Fox, leads all blueliners in terms of his rate of producing points per game. Cornell’s senior defenseman checks in at third in the same category. Both recorded a point when they first met. Friday’s contest will present both with the chance to settle which defenseman best runs his offense from the blue line.
 
Coach Schafer’s unfamiliarity with Lewis Zerter-Gossage’s name cannot become a trend in this series. Harvard is the program of selfish, individual efforts and glory-seeking plays. Cornell is the program of selfless team work that often sacrifices the individuals acclaim for the benefit of the program and University. It is Cornell, not Harvard, that should produce the unexpected stars in this game. If the Red cannot, it likely will fall again to Harvard this season.
 
Anthony Angello is far from an unexpected star. If anything, he is one of the usual suspects. The sophomore forward had not found the back of the net since Cornell’s first game against Miami in December. Thankfully, he found it again. It will continue hopefully Friday and days subsequent.
 
It was Angello’s defensive responsibility in the Clarkson game in particular that stood out to the contributors of Where Angels Fear to Tread. He thwarted break-away attempts. He grinded out opponents and wore them down with aggressive backchecking and forechecking. His first goal in seven games was a much-deserved product of such efforts.
 
The elation of a victory or deflation from a loss against Cornell’s nemesis at Lynah Rink can doom the Red’s efforts in a Saturday contest against Dartmouth. This Cornell team cannot afford a letdown that gives the Big Green from Hanover points. The Paradox of 1911 could ensnare the Big Red this weekend as it has for far too long.
 
How long has it been since Cornell defeated Dartmouth on East Hill? If you said five years, you are correct. Dartmouth has left Lynah Rink with points in every meeting in Ithaca for the past half-decade. That drought needs to be inundated this weekend.
 
No matter the result on Friday, Cornell needs to prove that it can look past the outcome and narrows it focus on the next opponent. Like last Saturday, the sense among the Faithful and within the program should be the same. The Lynah Faithful and players alike must enjoy the struggles of the moment and the satisfaction of victory. However, once hands are shaken, only one questions remains no matter whom was last vanquished: Who’s next?
 
Speaking of droughts without wins, has it really been two years since Cornell defeated Harvard? The Red has gone 0-2-2 since Eric Freschi got the better of Steve Michalek with just 41 seconds in lingering regulation in an instant-classic tilt between the historic foes.
 
Who’s the next hero? It is time for another instant classic. It is time to beat Harvard again.
 
Yes, we do. We want Harvard.

​Cornell won the first of the five games against teams that occupied a higher rung in ECAC Hockey’s standing when the Red began its season-closing conference slate. The second of those five games comes on Friday. Harvard’s recent slide places the Crimson just behind the Red in the effective standings weighted by rate of earning conference points. A victory over Harvard would jettison Cornell farther above their rival. All the positives of that can be undone on Saturday if the Paradox of 1911 leads to another loss to Dartmouth. If Cornell had mustered but one more point against the Big Green in Hanover, the Red would be outpacing the requirements of the Law of Schafer (earning points at a rate equivalent to sweeping at home and splitting on the road) and positioned second in the effective conference standings.
 
Cornell can undo that damage this weekend, especially with St. Lawrence’s hosting Union amid rumors within the Saints’s program that Gavin Bayreuther may not return this season. The path to Lake Placid is a treacherous, ice-covered one. Cornell still has half of its conference games to etch into stone or erase all hopes of a bye.

​Home is where the hatred is. The Cornell-Harvard rivalry is no different. The friendly confines of the respective programs are where fans feel emboldened to unleash the sheer pandemonium that their ids’s baser sentiments toward their institutional foes direct. Home is where rabbits, chickens, fish, sharks, and corn streak through the air and hazard defilement of vigilant banners earned often in legendary clashes between these champions.
 
The irony of the success of the hockey programs of Cornell University and Harvard University is that the greatest tilts between the nemeses have played out at venues that neither calls home. Surely, the Lynah Faithful make the Crimson keenly aware of their presence no matter the venue. The scornful eye of far-off exhibitors throttles the rites of college hockey’s greatest rivalry. Things are far less tame when Cornell and Harvard brave each other’s rinks in the first rounds of the ECAC Hockey tournament.
 
A playoff series in your enemy’s building is something distinct. Cornell and Harvard get to move on from the oppressive expectations of their series when they meet in the regular season no matter the result. The same is not true in the first rounds of the post-season.
 
The sound of the rink door slamming and latching behind players offers no escape. A heavy sigh accompanies the realization that you’re going to have to face those…Lou Reycroft had a word for Harvard (think William the Conqueror)…again. Tomorrow. You cannot escape the misfortunes and ill choices of the previous night upon rolling over from a sleepless night in a strange bed. Instead, you have to brace to face the same despair once more.
 
Seeding has visited this fortune upon the Cornell-Harvard rivalry on five occasions. These episodes in the long-running spectacle of the series could be best known as The Ones with Two-Night Stands. The players and sets in these entries befit an emotionally charged institutional feud between nemeses grounded in Cornell’s resolution to redeem American higher education from the depths of ignominy to which Harvard plunged it.
 
Wearers of carnelian and crimson assume with alacrity the dramatis personae that outrageous fortune assigns them.

​The stage determines the heroes. The hosts in such conflicts are the protagonists, ask Jack Norworth. Faithful, fret not the bend of this piece from Where Angels Fear to Tread, of the five meetings in the first rounds of the playoff, Cornell has hosted four of them. Harvard was the home team but once.
 
That once was a memorable series in March 1994. Bright Hockey Center hosted the Red in the ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. The full experience of Lynah East was not born yet. Harvard was preferred. The Crimson more than rose to the expectations to deliver victory at home. No Cantab on the home team’s roster remembered the embarrassment of elimination at Lynah Rink in 1990. Some played as though they suffered it personally.
 
Steve Martins turned on the red light often during that series for the Crimson. The junior contributed five points on the Crimson’s five goals in the final game of the series. Two goals and three assists made Martins’s performance something of lore. The second of the junior’s markers came as Martins lost his edge, fell to his knees, and still tucked the vulcanized disk behind Andy Bandurski.
 
The rivalry’s heat regularly melts the ice and costs the sure footing of home-team heroes. Doug Stienstra sprang a three-on-two trap against Harvard and led home-standing Cornell in the 2000 ECAC Hockey First Round. The Red forward lost his footing as he charged toward J. R. Prestifilippo. The reward already was won. The puck went behind the Crimson netminder as Stienstra recollected himself to celebrate with his team. That goal won the opening contest of the 2000 ECAC Hockey First Round at Lynah Rink. It was not his last.
 
Martins’s five points against Cornell would seem sizable. Doug Stienstra’s performance in the 2000 post-season matched his line identically with two goals and three assists. The senior from British Columbia twice had the opportunity to end Harvard’s season at Lynah Rink. He leads all players in these five on-campus playoff meetings with six points when one considers his performances in the 2000 ECAC Hockey First Round and 1997 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. Stienstra was not the last to tie Martins’s performance in the rivalry’s playoff series.
 
It was against Harvard that “the dream-crushing, soul-devouring juggernaut” wielded its club most heavily. The Red toyed with the Crimson as a cat does a cornered mouse in the 2010 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. Nick D’Agostino mounted a write-in campaign to become the next Crimson Killer after Doug Krantz’s graduation left the post vacant for a season. D’Agostino drove a rebound from Mike Devin past Kyle Richter for game one’s winner.
 
The freshman blueliner was not finished. Blake Gallagher and Tyler Roeszler flashed speed as D’Agostino and they caught the Crimson in a malaise. This breakaway goal for the newcomer typified his break-out performance in a pivotal series. It was not the most prolific carnelian-and-white performance of the weekend.
 
Western Canada continued to treat the Red well on March 12 and 13 in 2010. Riley Nash joined Steve Martins and Doug Stienstra as players in the rivalry who recorded five points in a single series between the historic foes. The junior achieved this elevated feat behind two goals and three assists as his predecessors did. Blake Gallagher and Colin Greening rounded out the four Cornellians who averaged more than a point per game in the 2010 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. It was not the Red’s most prolific performance against the Crimson in a post-season series.
 
The 1990 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal is the historic and conceivably most important playoff series that Cornell and Harvard have played. Five wearers of the carnelian and white produced at a rate greater than one point per game as the Cantabs made a two-game stand in Ithaca. The names are ones that one would expect, some are still seen at Lynah Rink today, Ross Lemon, Joe Dragon, Kent Manderville, Casey Jones, and Doug Derraugh.
 
Cornell never gave Harvard a chance to play its game in the second night of that series. Harvard broke a truism of hockey: Never leave Doug Derraugh open in front of your net, especially if you are Harvard. Joe Dragon with the hardened calculation of a Cornellian saw Derraugh alone in front of the Crimson cage. Dragon connected. Derraugh did what Brian McCutcheon always expected of him. He snapped the release.
 
It pierced the virgin air of Lynah Rink. The star junior forward opened scoring just 51 seconds into the contest. Derraugh had scored the winner the previous night. The wearer of the carnelian 17 deservedly went on to win the first so-named Crimson Cup. No player from either program has surpassed Derraugh’s three goals against Harvard in the 1990 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal in any of the other four rivalry-laden post-season series.

​Villainy is often a product of perspective and interest. The greatest continuous villain for the Lynah Faithful from 1971 through 1990 was Harvard head coach Bill Cleary. Cleary was the waiver of handshakes, complainer of suggestively shaped media that broadcasted that “Harvard Sucks,” and dodger of “errant clearing attempts.” If there was a golem on which the Lynah Faithful directed all of their rage for nearly two decades, it was Bill Cleary.
 
Cleary won the 1989 NCAA National Championship. Harvard and he had designs on defending that title in Cleary’s announced last season behind Harvard’s bench. The Crimson stumbled to a sixth seed in the Eastern tournament. It would brave a purer hue on East Hill in the 1990 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. Cleary’s career ended at Lynah Rink.
 
One of Bill Cleary’s last sights as head coach was the burning image of the scoreboard above his exit at Lynah Rink reading Cornell four, Harvard two. This most loathsome of enemies was not without a supporting cast in that series. It was a frustrated ensemble on Saturday. Harvard chased the game and drew numerous foolish penalties in trying to endure the punishment of the Lynah Faithful and Red. The Crimson targeted skilled players like Joe Dragon.
 
Penalty killing became a necessity for a Harvard team that was nursing the hopes of continuing their head coach’s career but one more day. Kevin Sneddon for the Crimson botched a clearing attempt late in the second period.  The fatigued pass bounced off of his teammate and into the slot. Ryan Hughes marked the error of the Crimson’s ways.
 
Harvard only would dent the three-goal lead that Cornell enjoyed at that point. The scuffling and battling continued despite the Crimson’s narrowing the lead to two goals. Ted Donato was thrown from the contest with less than one minute remaining. The passions of the rivalry clearly overcame the future head coach of Harvard.
 
Infestations of penalties are common to the post-seasons between these fiercest of rivals. The 1997 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal lived that reality. The quick development of that series ironically occurred without the assistance of special teams. Brett Chodrow knotted the first game for Harvard with an impressive breakaway down the left wing that surprised Cornell’s usually stellar Jason Elliott. Ethan Philpott gave the Crimson a lead with less than 25 minutes in regulation.
 
It fell to the Red’s Vinnie Auger to rectify this cosmic wrong. A one-timer on which Doug Stienstra provided his first playoff point against Harvard bested Prestifilippo. The game progressed to a five-minute overtime. In a quirk of the format of that era’s ECAC Hockey tournament, the game ended in a tie. It is the only time that Harvard has been greeted with fish and left without a loss in the playoffs at Lynah Rink.
 
The Cornell squad that invaded Bright Hockey Center in March 1994 was not up to the task of grappling with a waning but still invested Crimson fanbase and defeating the most recent Harvard team to win a game in the national tournament. The fact that the Red relied upon a roster with only two seniors and 21 of 28 skaters playing in their freshman or sophomore seasons did not alleviate the sting of a consecutive losses in which its rival scored five goals. Cornell bore the fruits of talent, but it was not ripe yet for results.
 
Future heroes of the Cornell-Harvard series stood out to the Lynah Faithful who made the trek to Bright Hockey Center. Mike Sancimino scored late in the first period of game two to tie the contest, 2-2. Harvard’s ultimate victory did not detract from the fact that within two years’s time, Sancimino would elevate and tuck the puck behind Tripp Tracy for a winner over Cornell’s archrival in the 1996 Whitelaw Cup Final. 1994 was not the Red’s time.
 
Humbling defeat befell the Crimson at Lynah Rink one year after Cornell smothered Harvard in Lake Placid. Dominic Moore put forth a valiant effort, perhaps the best of any series-losing player in the history of the rivalry, with four assists as a freshman in his team’s most hostile environment. Harvard returned to Cambridge with matching 4-3 losses.
 
An unstoppable force proved to have no equal in the 2010 ECAC Hockey tournament. The role of antagonist was given to Harvard. The skaters for the Crimson did the best that they could. They did better than any other team that met Cornell in the Eastern post-season. Harvard scored the one goal that the Red allowed en route to the 2010 Whitelaw Cup. The answer to the obscure trivia fact of which player prevented the 2009-10 Cornell hockey team from going through its ECAC Hockey season with a perfect record of allowing no goals was Pier-Olivier Michaud.
 
Michaud’s effort was as inadequate relative to the task of defeating your rivals in their building as Ted Donato’s ability to will a win there. The task before Donato was no small one. He deserves little personal blame. Crimson teams have endured Lynah Rink four times in the playoffs. Cornell swept all of them. Four different coaches with varying temperaments and styles led those four teams. The result never deviated.
 
The predictability of result stands in stark contrast to the variation in head coaches on the Crimson side. Considerable consistency is a hallmark of the Red’s bench during these five post-season series between Cornell and Harvard. Mike Schafer has been behind the bench for four of the five on-campus playoff encounters in the rivalry. He was an assistant coach to Brian McCutcheon during the 1990 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal and served as head coach for the 1997, 2000, and 2010 installments. The stick-breaker’s hiatus in Kalamazoo prevented his coaching the 1994 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. Would carnelian-clad villainy have triumphed in Cambridge otherwise?

​The ebbs and flows of games raise hopes and descend spectators into despair.  The playoffs only aggravate these oscillations. The post-season played in one’s own building ups the ante even further. When Cornell and Harvard meet in all things, the stakes are high. On-campus playoff series between the institutional foils never could be immune from these trends.
 
There is the horror of inevitability. Harvard felt that before braving Lynah Rink in March 2010. Kyle Richter foreshadowed the inescapable days before that series, “we can’t let the crowd get us off our game. Their crowd always gives them a definite home-ice advantage and it plays a bit of a factor in our game.” Alex Biega, a captain whose career ended on the ice of East Hill, predicted that “against a defense like that, we need to have one of our best nights.”
 
Harvard might have had one of its best nights. Its result of scoring one goal in the ECAC Hockey tournament certainly was superior to any that any other team in the conference’s field could muster against that tournament’s rolling colossus. The 100th year of the Cornell-Harvard rivalry closed on March 13, 2010 with the Red sweeping the Crimson in four games for the first time in the series’s history.
 
The 1993-94 season suffered Harvard no regular-season losses in Cambridge. Cornell arrived in March with Harvard having not lost a conference game since early December. The Red wrested control of the game from circumstance early in both contests. Cornell scored first each night. The daunting task before Cornell wore on its young roster and surrendered control of the game on late goals in the second period twice. The second night’s dagger plunged with just 16 seconds remaining in the second period.
 
Mark Mazzoleni promised his charges in the 2000 ECAC Hockey First Round that “the crowd is only a factor when Cornell starts getting some momentum” and Harvard “can take them out of the game.” Tim Stay, who would end his career a year later in a post-season loss to Cornell in Lake Placid, explain that Harvard “get[s] fired up by the crowd as much as [Cornell does]” while adding that “the best sound to hear there is silence.” Harvard had a plan.
 
The Crimson appeared to execute it in each game of the quarterfinal. Harvard scored in the first ten minutes of each game to take each game’s first lead. Mazzoleni must have seemed quite like The Grinch upon hearing the soothing song of the Whos down in Whoville the morning after his nefarious plot. Much like the Whos without presents on Christmas Day, the Lynah Faithful took their team’s trailing as a dare to impel it on to victory. Harvard lost both contests after holding a lead when during the regular season it owned a 9-2-2 mark given similar advantage.
 
The stakes never were higher than they were in the 1990 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. The weekend series between nemeses had attached a retirement stipulation for Bill Cleary’s career. Cleary had reason to be confident. His Harvard teams had swept Cornell in the regular season. They also had done it nine consecutive times before the season. No player on Cornell’s roster knew how it felt to defeat Harvard.
 
Unfortunately for Harvard, the Red recognized this. Kent Manderville lamented that his teammates and he “have a lot to prove [because] we haven’t won a big game all year.” Assistant coach Schafer and head coach McCutcheon could guide their team as to how it felt to bring victory over Harvard to “our noble alma mater.”
 
Harvard’s run of consecutive wins over Cornell broke in that series. The career of one Harvard coach ended. Harvard’s future coach was ejected. Legends were writ.

​A rivalry of such stakes between two institutions that compete in all things when given the chance for release in the medium of sports tends to take upon too serious or stoic of a tone. Spectators of the on-campus post-season meetings between Cornell and Harvard tend to keep things in perspective and remember that such contests, as emotionally charged as they may be, are a form of entertainment. Some of the most memorable events have occurred as a spectacle off the playing surface of the series.
 
The anomalous playoff tie between Cornell and Harvard, a result that belligerents of the rivalry have found unacceptable since January 28, 1911, began with an exuberant chant. Jamie Papp for the Red corralled the puck from a scrum along the boards in Harvard’s end. He cut toward the net and jabbed the puck into the Crimson net.
 
Cornell took 29 seconds to score in game one. The Lynah Faithful sung the praises of Papp’s effort. Chants of “thirty seconds” rattled off of the rafters. Many Harvard players likely wished that the Faithful would restrain their involvement to mere verbal barrage. Such likely never will be the case.
 
A particularly ambitious member of the Lynah Faithful procured a much larger fish to hurl at the Cantabs before the commencement of the 2000 ECAC Hockey First Round. That March was the first time that a shark greeted Cornell’s visitors from the Bay State before line-ups were announced. Harvard players traditionally expect this form of harassment when on the ice.
 
The Faithful have not felt restricted to in-game antics when Harvard braves Lynah Rink in the playoffs. Harvard did not benefit from restful nights in their hotel in Central New York in 1997. Some Cornell partisans obtained phone numbers to the hotel rooms in which the players from Cambridge were staying. These members of the Faithful proceeded to prank call those rooms throughout the night.
 
Bill Cleary demanded and received special attention through the series. His last hurrah, the 1990 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal, was no different. Cleary realized the demoralizing toll that the Lynah Faithful had exacted on his squad in the first game of the series. The Crimson’s head coach elected to suffer it firsthand.
 
Cleary joined the Big Red Pep Band and the Lynah Faithful on the bleachers during warm-ups with a sousaphone positioned over both ears. He grinned the entire time. The Faithful in turn bade him adieu with chants of “goodbye, bald guy” in his last moments as coach of the Crimson.
 
The few fans of Harvard who brave Lynah Rink rarely are confident enough to lay their allegiance bare let alone insult their hosts. That was different in March 2000. Crimson fans decked themselves in “Cornell Sucks” shirts to watch their hopes be dashed in a memorable installment of the series.
 
Elation so overcame those assembled at Lynah Rink on March 11, 2000 that they flooded the ice to celebrate with their carnelian and white-clad victors. Coach Schafer referred to the delirium as “a neat, college hockey environment” that “puts the players in touch with the fans.” The crowd need not literally spill onto the ice to have a direct impact on the contest.
 
Game two of the 2010 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal witnessed the absolute wilting of the Crimson in the face of a harassing wall that told Cornellian truths of Harvard’s being a safety school and grade inflation. Harvard leveled only three shots at Ben Scrivens in the first period. Rubber struck the savior from Spruce Grove only seven times in the second stanza. The boast of a proud member of the Lynah Faithful, “you should see what we can do in our own house with a week to plan and a few buckets of red paint,” presaged another post-season loss at Lynah Rink for Harvard a decade later.
 
The meeting of March 2010 was a fitting end to a season in which The Harvard Crimson designated Cornell Harvard's most hated foe. Harvard dubbed Lynah Rink a “house of horrors” that housed Harvard’s greatest rival on March 10, 2000. Lynah Rink deserves this distinction as it is the most common place for Harvard’s season to end on the road.
 
The Crimson and their eponymous periodical saw the value in measuring oneself by an institution that inspires your own to become something greater. Such foresight recently absented itself from The Crimson. Predictably, complacency fills its void.

​The game ends. Generations of fans, alumni, and players who love this most special of rivalries return to their homes. No matter whether it was uplifting or depressing, there is an emotional release that follows each installment. The outpouring of emotion from a post-season victory over one’s nemesis lasts for years. This contributor speaks from personal experience. The feeling is no different for the players who wage these unforgettable battles.
 
Seniors of the victorious Harvard in 1994 would have preferred to encounter no team more than Cornell in the playoffs. Sean McCann summarized that “it’s a good way to go out” that he would not trade. On the opposite side three years later, the emotion of Crimson players could not be contained. Brett Chodrow maintained that the series is always special because “no matter what the situation and who is where in the standing, it will always be about the Cornell-Harvard rivalry.”
 
The altruism of two nemeses came out at the close of the 1990 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinal. C.J. Young from Harvard hugged Dave Burke and Tim Vanini of Cornell during the post-game handshakes. Bill Cleary did not wave his team off the ice that time. Both sides remarked at the class with which both sides carried themselves.
 
Bill Cleary after a humbling defeat to his alma mater’s archrival ran across the ice to give Coach McCutcheon a hug. It was to say that if it had to end against someone, it was best that it was you. Nearly three decades leave that feeling among the programs unchanged.
 
Before those handshakes and embraces, there are hatred and emotion. Always.

​The men of the carnelian and white are returning home for the first time in the new year. The new year can mean only one thing: The Red is in hot pursuit of seeding. Formidable Clarkson and a surprisingly steady St. Lawrence chase our preferred team back onto the ice of Lynah Rink.
 
Last weekend was exactly what this Cornell team needed. The fears of a postseason-dooming slump are slightly allayed (for another week). Readers may call me a pessimist. However, a team is only as good as its next sweep, split, or swept (? yeesh), and programs are only as good as the dust that they can keep off of their banners.
 
Cornell beat a Quinnipiac team that has mustered only four favorable results in 12 attempts since leaving Central New York in November. The Tigers of Princeton meanwhile are six games below 0.500 in ECAC Hockey. This is not to diminish the accomplishment of last weekend’s road sweep. It was a big deal.
 
Trust me, there was much jubilance and celebration at the Tower-overlooking lair of Where Angels Fear to Tread after the last second expired on Saturday. A lens of perspective is needed. The road only gets rougher.
 
Clarkson and St. Lawrence are two and seven (yes, seven) games above 0.500 in ECAC Hockey so far this season. The North Countrymen have produced a 0.625 winning percentage since the page of the calendar changed days ago. Union’s lone blemishes on the ECAC Hockey regular season, a loss and tie, were inflicted at the hands of the Golden Knights and Saints in Schenectady. Yeah, things are about to get real…perspective-y.
 
Clarkson may have given Union its only loss in ECAC Hockey, but it is St. Lawrence that is poised to be the behemoth this season. The Saints are looking to get over that recent Carvelian hump of getting to the Whitelaw Cup Semifinals and then losing in overtime. The Laurentians have the talent to do it.
 
Gavin Bayreuther is a star of the game. His blistering overtime-forcing goal against Colgate in the 2015 ECAC Hockey Semifinal surely would have been one for the history books…if St. Lawrence had won its seventh Whitelaw Cup in Lake Placid that weekend. He is a star defenseman who leads the Saints in points still despite missing his team’s last four games. The rub therein lies.
 
The Lynah Faithful will not be treated to the display of Bayreuther on Saturday night. The dazzling defender likely will not appear even at Cornell’s game at Appleton in February. For better or worse, the Big Red likely will not face a Bayreuther-led Saints squad unless the teams meet in the post-season. The score as to which defensemen, Gavin or Paddy, drives his team’s offense with more aplomb will need to wait to be decided at another date. The two rank as the second- and third-most point producing defensemen in ECAC Hockey.
 
The services of the Saints’s leading goal scorer, Mike Marnell, were absent from the ice last weekend. Reliable contributor Jacob Pritchard returned to the line-up against Yale after a four-game hiatus. St. Lawrence has been playing with less than its ideal line-up considering its roster and remained dangerous. Another talent is why.
 
Mark Morris, varyingly of ECAC Hockey fame and infamy, followed Route 11 away from his previous coaching layover toward Ithaca and landed in Canton. Morris’s history with Cornell, much like the new chapters of the new series for which he now wields a quill as bench boss, is not without definition. The last game that Brian McCutcheon, a stealthy and cutting forward of Cornell’s 1969-70 team, coached at Cornell was against Morris-led Golden Knights in the 1995 ECAC Hockey Quarterfinals during the Red’s decade-long championship drought.
 
The story got rosier when Coach Schafer called the lines at Lynah Rink. Coach Schafer amassed an 11-7-0 record against Mark Morris while the latter was at Clarkson. Cornell never met defeat against the denizens of Potsdam in the playoffs despite three post-season meetings in just seven years. Famously, the Schafer-led Ithacans completed a defense of their 1996 Whitelaw Cup in the 1997 Whitelaw Cup Final against Mark Morris’s Clarkson in Lake Placid. The loss was Morris’s first in ECAC Hockey’s championship game.
 
Mark Morris knows how to win if that is not self-evident. Only Jack Parker, Ned Harkness, Joe Marsh, and one other coach have won the East’s top prize more than has St. Lawrence’s current bench boss. Oh, yeah, that other fellow will be standing behind the benches on the South side of Lynah Rink on Saturday.
 
You feel it in the air, don’t you?
 
This bout will be the beginning of something big; something worthy of a series steeped in history. On Friday, this Cornell team will face off against a program whose leader is an alumnus of the ideology of Cornell hockey. Saturday brings a marquee that heralds a collision of two of the best coaches in the history of ECAC Hockey. It is fitting for the most decorated collegiate programs in New York (when RIT joins ECAC Hockey, this writer will decide how to credit its non-Division I success).
 
Were the trophy cases of the three programs to collide, there would be 23 Whitelaw Cups in the wreckage to distribute among the three programs. It is like one of those fabricated made-for-TV Wednesday Night Rivalries that NBC Sports and the NHL force upon you, you think about it, they tell you that it is matter because it is two Original Six teams, and then, by the end, you feel the passion. This weekend brings that to Ithaca.
 
St. Lawrence, Clarkson, and Cornell are the forefathers of New-York hockey and founding reservoirs of college hockey. The Red’s series with the Golden Knights is the ninth-oldest active series for the former. St. Lawrence plays Cornell in the Ithacan’s 12th-oldest active series. The Cornell-St. Lawrence series is second only to the Saints’s spat with rival Clarkson in terms of age. Cornell, meanwhile, is Clarkson’s oldest opponent.
 
At one time, these programs built up New-York and college hockey. This weekend, each aims to tighten their resumes as they aim to gain whatever advantages that they can to climb the precious standings in ECAC Hockey to carry their decorated programs back to the mountaintop (one can assume it is Whiteface, right?).
 
The standout of last weekend was unquestionably (wait, it has to be hat trick-scoring freshman Jeff Malott, right?) Holden Anderson. Malott’s following his first collegiate goal in a Cornell sweater with his second and third was the easy story of Friday. Anderson did the little things on Friday, especially, and Saturday that led to the Red’s success this weekend. The senior blueliner played responsibly in both zones including unleashing his blistering shot to punish goaltenders with regular reminders that “the redcoats are coming.” The Faithful are left wondering how Holden Anderson has not recorded a goal this season.
 
Assistant coach Flanagan’s work with the Red’s forecheck has produced a dynamic attack that had its first glimmers of true brilliance at Princeton and Quinnipiac. There was one downside as Cornell defended its lead in Hamden. Now, a weekend in which Cornell killed 90.0% of opponent’s power-play opportunities is not cause for concern on the ledger. Games are not played in spreadsheets. They are played on the ice.
 
The carnelian-and-white penalty killers looked unfocused and undirected on their penultimate call to duty against Quinnipiac. Nearly nine minutes remained in regulation when the Bobcats got their fourth power-play opportunity of the weekend which afforded Pecknold’s boys more than enough time to write a very different ending to the affair; One that would have been characteristic of recent tilts between the two programs. That ending never came no matter how much lapses in defense and special teams invited its arrival.
 
One can trust that Associate Head Coach Ben Syer and Coach Schafer noticed these missteps and corrected them in practice. If they did not, errors will continue to compound as unseasoned success masks the development of bad tendencies that will be much harder to remove if reinforced with time. Clarkson brings ECAC Hockey’s third-best power-play unit to Lynah Rink. The Knights will provide an early test as to whether last Saturday showed a team that took shifts off or that has taken a shift for the worse in its approach to the game.

​The first of what were last week the five games that Cornell would play against the three teams that were perched above the Red in the effective standings for ECAC Hockey is against St. Lawrence. The Saints right now are locked in with the second-best winning rate in ECAC Hockey. Cornell is one rung below them. The rates of earning conference points between Cornell and St. Lawrence is just 0.14 conference points per game. The contest against Clarkson is no less crucial to all-important post-season jockeying. Clarkson is earning conference points just 0.26 conference points per game slower than is Cornell. A heated battle for top-four spots likely will involve the Golden Knights and Red when February arrives. Cornell will have played half of its conference games by weekend’s end.

​With just under half of the conference schedule played out, seeding is starting to settle in ECAC Hockey for where teams stand. While a casual observer might see Cornell settled into fifth place, she doesn’t take into consideration that two of the teams directly ahead of Cornell have played three more games than has the Red. What are the real standings heading into a tough road weekend in the North Country? Instead of points alone, let us use points per game – a metric that lets one realize the amount of points that a team tends to garner each game out of its total two points.

​Let the games begin.
 
The first half of the season is prologue. This season will be made or broken in the next several weeks. The non-conference schedule is fine and good, but the greatest of Cornell’s seasons are writ or erased in the closing of conference play.
 
Some readers or new congregants of the Lynah Faithful may find themselves questioning that contention. Is it not true that out-of-conference contests sow the seeds that may blossom into games played in late March or even April? Are not glorious at-large bids that have given the world Minnesota-Duluth, Yale, and Providence as national champions the product of admirable performances outside of conference play? Does it not matter where the Red ranks now in the premature pairwise of early January?
 
The last inquiry has caused considerable debate and underhanded sniping on social media between various commentators of college hockey. The answer to that question as posed above is an emphatic “no.” It does not matter where Cornell ranks in the Pairwise Ranking now. The volatility of its ranking makes projections from this moment all but meaningless. There is a caveat to this outright dismissal as there are to all great truisms.
 
Cornell’s ranking in the Pairwise does not matter now. However, the rankings of all programs are not irrelevant. Consider Cornell relative to current Pairwise-Ranking leader Penn State. As of December 15, the arbitrary date that most have used in this debate, the Red had played 11 games while the Nittany Lions had played 15 games. The Pairwise fluctuates with each win, loss, or tie. A larger sample size of results necessarily reinforces a more durable ranking by its parameters.
 
Quantifying this phenomenon is quite easy. Penn State arrived at December 15 having played nearly 45% of its regular-season schedule. Cornell approached the same date having completed 6.2% less of its own slate. Framed another way, the Central Pennsylvanians finished a 16.4% larger share of their completed schedule than had the Ithacans by the middle of December.
 
Each regular-season game that Cornell plays necessarily represents a larger percentage of its schedule than do the games that non-Ivies play as a product of the limitations of Ivy-League scheduling. Additionally, Cornell’s having played barely more than one-third of its games while other programs like Penn State have played nearly half of theirs by December 15 functions as a weighted average that allows violent variation in the former and considerable predictability in the latter. The former is easier to change for better or worse. The latter is more stagnant.
 
So, yes, for some programs, the Pairwise Ranking of December 15 is a worthy predictor of the likelihood of receiving an invitation to the Frozen Four First Round. It is not for Cornell. The 2013-14 and 2015-16 seasons provide a ripe anecdote of why. In both of those seasons, Cornell was “in” the national-tournament field as of December 15. Did Cornell play any games in the last weekend of March those seasons?
 
This writer so readily dismisses the value of a sound performance in out-of-conference play because over the last half-decade, Cornell has accumulated a 20-10-4 record in out-of-conference contests. Only once in that time did the Red not produce a winning non-conference record. Cornell made the national tournament in none of those four completed seasons.
 
The Red’s 5-2-0 non-conference record this season is promising. It remains but a very short line in the resume any or this Cornell team will need to draft to hear Buccigross call its name on March 19. The formula for earning entry into the national tournament is the template of the last season in which Cornell earned entry to the Frozen-Four tournament.
 
Which victory catapulted Coach Schafer and his 17th team into the national tournament? It was an instant-classic victory over Union in late February. Oh, yeah, Cornell did not have a winning non-conference record that season.
 
Cornell’s next berth in the national tournament will be like its last one: forged in the build-up to the chase for the Whitelaw Cup. The newest members of the Lynah Faithful should be more worried about playing in the penultimate weekend of March before focusing only on getting to that month’s concluding games. The formula for competing for and hopefully (it has been fartoo long) winning a Whitelaw Cup has not changed in Coach Schafer’s 22 years.
 
Coach Schafer took the reins of the Clydesdale that is Cornell hockey with four stated benchmarks for a good season: sweep Harvard, earn a bye in the playoffs, compete for the Whitelaw Cup, and make a run at a national title. Cornell has not accomplished the second of those benchmarks in two seasons. The means of achieving that goal were simplified in a way that only a great coach of the game could.
 
Teams that want to enjoy real home ice, the type that comes with a bye, must at least sweep at home and split on the road. This is the Schafer Formula. The Red has earned a bye every time that Cornell has earned conference points at a rate equivalent to that mandate. Only once have the carnelian and white won at that rate and not won the Whitelaw Cup.
 
Formula may be too mild a word on second thought. Perhaps, it is more aptly the Schafer Theory if not the First Law of Schafer. It works no matter the nomenclature. Oh, for those so inclined, each time that Schafer-coached teams earned conference points at an equivalent rate, Cornell advanced to the national tournament.
 
This Cornell team endured the longest roadtrip in the modern era of Cornell hockey to begin the 2016-17 season. The Red’s conference schedule reflects the frequency of games away from friendlier Lynah Rink. Cornell has played five games in ECAC Hockey on the road. It has played conference opponents twice at home. Cornell would have nine conference points if it produced results at the rate that the Law requires. Cornell owns exactly nine points.
 
Cornell was precisely on schedule with its in-conference results in the first half of the season. Check the tense of the verb in that sentence. The second season begins on Friday. Cornell positioned itself well for a big second half in ECAC Hockey. The skaters of East Hill sit at an effective fourth place in conference standings.
 
Only Union, Harvard, and St. Lawrence have made more of their in-conference opportunities than have the members of this Cornell hockey team. Cornell is currently earning 24.0% fewer points per game than is St. Lawrence. Union and Harvard are several steps ahead earning 0.41 and 0.38 more points per game than the Red is right now.
 
The Red has ground that it needs to make up over the next several weeks. A bye would award Cornell were the playoffs to begin before Friday. The playoffs do not begin for nearly two months. Those two months are a double-edged sword.
 
The weekends of those months provide ample opportunity for Cornell to plummet to the lower rungs of the conference like it did last season after challenging Quinnipiac for the league’s first seed. Coach Schafer will lead his squad in five games against the three teams currently outperforming it. This will provide this team with the rope to ascend the sheer cliff to a bye or to hang itself with the need to play in the first round for a third consecutive season.
 
The Law anticipates that a good season for wearers of the carnelian and white amounts to earning 1.50 conference point per game. However, Cornell has earned berths to the Frozen Four First Round and byes with rates not quite as lofty. The Red rolls at an average winning rate of 1.34 points per game when it earns a post-season bye.
 
This team gained credit toward seeding at a rate of 1.29 conference points per game in the first half. It was off pace by the 22-year average of rest-earning Cornell teams. The Red needs to improve to secure that elusive and all but necessary bye. The good news is the road ahead of this team.
 
The road to Lake Placid can be paved with fallen opponents whom Cornell enjoys felling. The latest regular-season installments of the contemporary rivalry with Union and historic clash with nemesis Harvard at Lynah Rink will provide ample motivation beyond mere getting points for three key clashes. The motivations for the remainder should be simple.
 
As one keen observer of ECAC Hockey reminds this writer from time to time, in the opinions of the 11 other members of ECAC Hockey, Cornell is often regarded as the most loathsome opponent in the conference. It is the big game. The travelling, obnoxious, and resurgent Lynah Faithful only will add to the stakes of each of the six remaining road games. This weekend sends the Red on the road.
 
Senior defenseman and alternate captain Patrick McCarron who has answered the call of Where Angels Fear to Tread and this contributor to be a mainstay point producer for Cornell (he is tied currently for the most points on the team) will lead his team against Princeton and Quinnipiac this weekend. Princeton may be winless since its attention-getting win streak broke on December 17. The Tigers nonetheless performed admirably against stout competition last weekend. Princeton traded offensive blows with Harvard during the Tigers’s last outing. It was not until a series of fortuitous power plays, a trend that is emerging in Cambridge, allowed the Crimson to pull away for good.
 
Quinnipiac is Quinnipiac. The Bobcats have put the Ithacans in the red too many times in recent memories. So, a 4-6-1 record since Cornell last fell to Quinnipiac should not give Cornell any undeserved confidence in approaching Saturday’s match-up.
 
Cornell needs to heed Drake’s ever-appropriate admonition for all the other contests. The Red has enemies. They have designs on draining the Red of any inertia it can muster to win a Whitelaw Cup.
 
Any effort less than this team’s best should be anticipated to be met with defeat.

​An undeniable sense of history and dignity will pervade the air this weekend when we return to Lynah Rink for the first time in 35 days. It is not a mistake of any of your senses, tactile, olfactory, sixth, or other. The programs that will face off in the opener of the second half of the season will write another installment between two integral programs of women’s hockey.
 
Infrequently does either the men’s or women’s hockey program on East Hill hold anything over the other in terms of historic accomplishments and prestige; as one would expect of Cornellians. The Lady Rouge has won ten post-season tournaments in 45 years while its more testosterone-endowed counterpart has won 15 playoff championships in a century of intercollegiate competition. The women edge the men in championship winning rate by nearly 50% while the men uniquely can claim that three times their program has been declared the best in college hockey. As Cornell women so often do, they have a formidable, if not decisive, rebuttal that may be the last word in this tiff.

The Ivy League’s tournaments from 1976 through 1979 served as de facto national tournaments for deciding which women’s hockey program was that season’s best. However, few without and within Cornell hockey were so bold to proclaim the carnelian and white, victors of all four of those tournaments, national champions. Things changed in the 1979-80 season.
 
The expansion of women’s hockey beyond the ivy-covered walls of the Ancient Eight necessitated a more inclusive national tournament to decide an actual national champion. Northeastern University began competing in women’s hockey in 1978. The University of New Hampshire sponsored its first female icers in 1975. Meanwhile, the Ivy-League Tournament always excluded the third-oldest women’s hockey program. It hailed from Providence College.
 
Enter Providence.
​
The Friars began competing in 1973. Their success, including a 17-0 dismantling of Harvard, and the competitive elevation of the other two non-Ivy women’s program in the Northeast revealed that no program rightly could claim that it was national champion any longer without competing with these three other programs. The Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women provided the first instrument for determining which hockey program was the best in a given season. It hosted its first tournament at the end of the 1979-80 season.
 
The structure of the tournament was simple. It mirrored the format that the NCAA used in its Frozen-Four tournaments from 1948 through 1976. Only the four best, in the case of the EAIAW tournament, the four highest ranked, teams received invitations to vie for the spot atop the hierarchy of women’s hockey. The 1979-80 season decided which programs grappled in the first tournament sanctioned nominally to decide a national champion.
 
The four teams that ultimately received entry into the first EAIAW tournament were New Hampshire, Providence, Cornell, and Northeastern. The Wildcats of the Granite State accumulated 18 wins outside of the national tournament in the 1979-80 season. They did not lose. Northeastern received an invite on the tail of a 7-1 humbling of Harvard in the Beanpot. The Friars of Providence College rode the wave of a 19-2-0 regular-season record into the first national final four in women’s hockey. Cornell punched its ticket in predictable fashion. The Red outscored opponents 15 to four in a run to its fifth consecutive Ivy-League Championship to culminate a 16-5-0 season.
 
The inclusion of Cornell was a foregone conclusion. Cornell was the second-oldest women’s hockey program in the nation. It had dismantled the oldest program in the Ivy-League Championship Semifinal in nearly quintupling its opponent’s output. The Lady Rouge coined a fivepeat before vernacular for such an accomplishment was known.
 
Cornell drew Providence in the first national postseason. The teams had met earlier in the regular season. The Big Red did not hand the Friars one of their two losses. Cornell and Providence had met twice in their programs’s histories. The programs exchanged visits. Providence was victorious at Lynah Rink and Schneider Arena.
 
In a twist of fate drafted seemingly to test the mettle of the student-athletes of New York’s land-grant university, Schneider Arena was the studio of the 1980 EAIAW Championship. The carnelian and white returned to Schneider Arena to contest for a national title in March 1980. The task before this revolutionary program and its pioneering athletes was not unlike that which laid before the heroes who won Cornell’s first hockey championship in 1911 against Harvard in Boston Arena.
 
The players were fit and prepped. If there was a team that Cornell University would want to represent it in its first post-season, this was that team. The list of legends was fit for historical rolls. Sarah Mott tended the Red’s net. Brenda Condon and Cathy Northrop patrolled the blue line. Then, the list of Cornell’s forwards read like an all-star roster. It included Diane Dillon, Cheryl Hines, Cindy Warren, and Digit Degidio.
 
The game was hard-fought. Cornell, a program that had lost its two previous meetings to Providence by being outscored three to one, made the contest contentious from start to finish. Nevertheless, Digit, just minutes from her home, and her proud team fell victim to the emergent dominance of the Friars in a 5-3 decision. Cornell routed Northeastern, 5-1, the next day and Providence fell to New Hampshire, the only team to beat the Friars that season.
 
A third-place finish is not one celebrated at a program where cups overfloweth trophy cases. The invitation to compete with the sport’s best in the first national tournament is one that should be remembered. It ought to be immortalized as Cornell’s more recent national post-season runs are above the ice of one of hockey’s great sanctuaries.
 
That accomplishment makes women’s hockey at Cornell distinct. Bragging rights on this topic between the locker rooms on East Hill shift in favor of the ladies. It took the men’s program of Cornell University ten seasons to be invited to the Intercollegiate Hockey Association’s national tournament. The women’s program of the University was an inaugural invitee to the EAIAW’s national tournament.

The Lynah Faithful await banners that rightfully honor the Red’s 1911 IHA championship and invitation to the 1980 EAIAW Tournament. Both contribute to the excellence of Cornell hockey.
 
So, this weekend, when enjoying the contest at Lynah Rink, take a moment to realize and reflect that these programs truly did something remarkable together on one Spring day nearly four decades ago.