Harvard certainly came to play tonight showing no rust at all. For the first two periods, we dominated especially in the second period. Then things got out of hand with a lot of chippy play initiated by RPI. Starting with an absolutely garbage, cheap shot knee on knee hit on Kyle Criscuolo. Fortunately Kyle was okay and played the rest of the game but it got ugly real fast. RPI can't skate with us and so they decided the only way to win was to rough us up. They make Cornell look halfway respectable. At one point, while play was headed into the Harvard zone, an RPI D man got on top of Criscuolo, kept shoving his head into the ice and wouldn't let him get up. Unreal. The refs are largely to blame as they put their whistles in their pockets for the game and didn't call anything until the last minute of the third. But that doesn't excuse their cheap shots and hits after the whistle. Appert must be so proud. Wow.
Sean Malone got us started with a laser of a wrist shot on a great rush up the middle of the RPI D zone. Seb Lloyd made it 2-0 taking a nice feed from Ryan Donato near the left post. Colin Blackwell was the beneficiary of a batted puck that fell at his feet with Kasdorf caught at the opposite post - Blackwell slammed it home for a 3-0 lead. Then the five minute major for the hit on Criscuolo and Seb Lloyd got his second of the game tipping a blast from Ryan Donato from the point.
From there, Harvard got careless (on that same PP, we gave up a breakaway shortie) and then early in the third, RPI scored again when we left one of their forwards alone in front of Madsen. We weathered that storm and came back a few minutes later with Sean Malone spinning in front of RPI's backup goalie and depositing a forehand behind him.
Tyler Moy, Victor Newell and Jake Olson did not dress tonight. I think I saw Moy and he was wearing a walking boot. Wasn't much of a limp so I'm hoping he'll be ready next weekend.
We have to ignore the after the whistle stuff and focus on our skating game. When we were moving our feet, we completely broke down RPI's forecheck and were in their zone before you could blink an eye. When we got complacent, things broke down quickly.
The ice wasn't great after the first six or seven minutes of each period. The weather this week had an effect. Won't be any better tomorrow.