Jack Bar assumed his night was over.
The junior defenseman was seated on the Harvard bench next to Kyle Aucoin, and the duo had every reason to believe their night was over. For the past three hours, they’d skated their season opener in a conference game against Dartmouth, and a third period goal by the Big Green snagged at least one point away from an ECAC opponent. The three-on-three overtime period solved nothing, and by NCAA standards, what was officially scored as a tie game only had to plod through a shootout to determine which team received a second point in the league standings.
Neither Bar nor Aucoin was on the top list of shooters. That honor, they figured, belonged to more established scorers or younger forwards, but after the best-of-three skills competition devolved into a sixth or seventh round, they looked at each other and thought about the impossible.
Twelve rounds later, the impossible became reality, and Bar, a defenseman with one career goal – ironically against Dartmouth – faked a slap shot before pulling a wrister past Dartmouth netminder Cooper Black. The last guy on the roster, it ended an 18-round shootout that left a lasting image on college hockey even if it didn’t change anything in the national register.
“When the game went to the shootout, I kind of figured that I wasn’t a guy that goes, so I thought my night was over,” Bar said. “Somehow it got to the point where my name was called, which was super strange because there hadn’t been a shootout that went that long. At that point, we all just wanted to find someone on our team that could score, and I guess I was just lucky enough to get the chance to go out and score.”
The game itself already offered a critical proving ground for a Crimson team facing the uncertainty of a roster overhaul at the start of this season. Having lost players like 50-point scorer Sean Farrell, 40-point scorer Alex Laferriere and two 30-point scorers in Matt Coronato and Henry Thrun, it was obvious that Harvard’s line charts would look significantly different. How that translated to goals or performances was uncertain, but the first game offered a critical opportunity to gel the team’s chemistry against another Ivy League team starting the year later than the rest of college hockey.
By that nature, it wasn’t a perfect performance, but Casey Severo’s goal in the second period staked the Crimson to a 1-0 lead before Braiden Dorfman tied the game near the halfway mark of the third, and it was good enough to have Harvard in a position to grab the second league point both in the overtime and shootout periods. Dartmouth had blocked 20 of the Crimson’s 26 shots to that point, but both goalies – the Big Green’s Cooper Black and Harvard’s Derek Mullahy – put their respective teams on their respective backs at various points during the game.
“It can be dangerous to draw too many conclusions over one game,” said Harvard head coach Ted Donato. “But I think coming into the season, we didn’t have a lot of experienced returning scorers because of graduation and guys signing NHL contracts. I don’t think [this game] answered that question because we only scored one goal, but I don’t think that we’re making too many decisions after one game. We did some really good things and started off the game pretty well. There were some good looks, but I thought [Black] played excellent, and we understand there are nights where a goalie is seeing the puck really well and it’s going to be hard to score.”
It was fitting, then, that an even matchup went to an extra frame, and to a degree, the first game going to a shootout benefitted both teams with a tie towards the NCAA tournament standings and the Pairwise Rankings. It was just in that shootout where things got hairy after the first handful of opportunities missed or were saved by a team’s respective goalies.
Harvard shot first, and top line forwards Joe Miller and Ben MacDonald failed to solve the 6-foot-8 Black. Philip Tresca went third and likewise missed, and after Marek Hejduk failed to end the game, defensemen like Ian Moore started appearing on the ice.
“Once you get in the middle of the season and the scenario comes up, you might have a couple of ideas of who your guys are,” Donato said. “We scrimmaged UMass Lowell and did a shootout as a ‘just-in-case,’ just so our guys could go through an overtime [simulation], but you don’t necessarily go into the detail where you have those guys [ready]. You just kind of know it once you get to the middle of the season, but for whatever reason, I wrote five guys on the pregame board to get prepared for it. But once we got into the teens, you’re looking around at the bench and just asking, ‘Okay, who hasn’t shot yet?’”
The scenario led to Bar, a junior who scored his first career goal in last year’s season opening game against, ironically enough, Dartmouth. He was the last player besides Aucoin that hadn’t shot on Black, and after his linemate Matthew Morden missed, Donato sent him onto the ice for the 18th round.
“I was actually planning on taking a slapshot,” he laughed, “because I’d done that a couple of times in practice as kind of a joke where I’d go down and just rip a slapshot. But as I was going down the ice in the shootout, [Black] was just so big that I didn’t really see any space. So I just kind of thought to fake it and see if he moves a bit, then I saw a hole between his arm and his body on the blocker side and just kind of wristed it through.”
The goal won’t wind up on his stat sheet or in the record books, but it ended a night that ventured clear into the absurd stories associated with college hockey.
It’s strange to think about its impact, but one point was the difference between Colgate’s first round single elimination game and St. Lawrence’s first round bye. Three teams – RPI, Union and Princeton – all finished with the same number of points around the swing for first round home ice, and one extra point would have kept the Tigers home instead of sending them to Union.
All of this is a moot point given Princeton’s first round win and Colgate’s second round sweep through the North Country, but the argument remains the same that there are teams annually relegated or promoted throughout their standings because of their ability to gain an extra point in post-regulation play.
“I think everyone was just relieved that we got the extra point,” Bar admitted. “I think that it was obviously an exciting moment, but we couldn’t really celebrate that much because we knew we had a lot of things to work on. We could have played better, so after I scored, I know I didn’t want to make a big deal out of winning the game.
“It wasn’t like it was back and forth goals,” he said. “Nobody was putting the puck in the net, but we really wanted to win it for our goalie. [Mullahy] was standing on his head and obviously made 18 straight saves. Some guys were missing, but the goalies played on their heads. It was just a very weird situation.”
Weird or not, Harvard got the extra point and now moves into this weekend with a galvanizing moment for its team. The Crimson are returning home to play Princeton before shifting their attention to defending national champion Quinnipiac on Saturday at Bright-Landry Hockey Center.
It’s another surreality given that the Tigers are opening the season in the first weekend in November at a time when other programs are already eight or 10 games deep, but the opportunity to continue building the team is a juicy possibility given what awaits on Saturday night.
“Getting the one extra point is huge for us,” Donato said. “Sometimes there’s a mentality where your team is in a game, and if you’re out-shooting the other team or outplaying the other team, there’s a mentality where they’re just kind of holding on. We had the mentality [against Dartmouth] that we wanted to get some points, and when we got the overtime three-and-three, we had a chance to get the second point, which we got in the shootout.”
“We were all just really super pumped to get out there,” Bar said. “It always feel like it takes forever for us to start up our games, so we were just really excited to play a real game and play a league game. We came out hard, and there were some things that we want to work on but because our group is so young, it just means that we have so much room to grow.
“That’s going to be really exciting for us this year,” he added. “We have a really close group, and that kind of sets us up really well, especially as a defensive core. We’re just doing the little things all around the ice to help the forwards, and we’re working on getting pucks through from the point because getting that puck to the net is going to create more chances. That’s what we need right now because we want to create more offense, which includes the blue line from our defenders.”
Harvard hosts Princeton on Friday night in its home opener before turning the clock to Quinnipiac on Saturday night. Both games are scheduled for Bright-Landry Hockey Center with 7 p.m. EDT starts.
