Men's hockey beats lowly Brown, ties Harvard to snag seven seed for playoffs

It was the nadir of the season. As low as the men's hockey team fell during its midseason eight-game losing streak, it seemed even lower after the 7-3 loss to Colgate Feb. 10.

The losing streak was a thing of the past and Princeton had since cut down the first-place team in the Eastern College Ath-letic Confer-ence not once but twice. But for the second time in as many weeks, the Tigers found themselves on the losing end of a blowout on the night after those big wins. They were not losing all the time, but inconsistency threatened to mar the remainder of the season — an inconsistency that would lead to Princeton's demise in the playoffs.

"Maybe we're just not a very good team," senior center Kirk Lamb said after the Colgate loss. "I know that's not true, but when you start thinking things like that, it's not good."

That was the bottom. The lowest of the low. Princeton could do nothing right. Sometimes a team like this needs to touch the bottom before climbing back to the top.

"We were about as low as we could be," junior goalkeeper Dave Stathos said. "But we set some goals for ourselves, said we wanted to finish the season by winning six out of 10."

Since that dark night, the 7-3 loss, those words of piercing self-doubt, the Tigers have changed. Whatever they did in the following week spurred a turnaround. A close 1-0 loss to Rensselaer less than one week later ushered in a five-game unbeaten streak to close out the season.

When it once seemed as though Princeton was incapable of earning more than two points in a weekend, the Tigers (10-14-5 overall, 9-9-4 ECAC) now have their second three-point weekend in a row. A 4-1 defeat of Brown (4-21-4, 4-16-4) Friday night and a 2-2 tie with Harvard (13-14-2, 12-8-2) on Saturday propelled Princeton to a seventh-place finish in the ECAC.

The Tigers are on the upswing, riding on Stathos' shoulders into the playoffs and playing their best hockey at the time of the season when it matters most. And Colgate, the administrator of that crushing loss Feb. 10, will not even see the post-season.

"A lot of it has been mental," Stathos said. "We have a lot of players with character. We've been in a couple do-or-die situations and we've survived."

Princeton proved its perseverance this weekend when it fell behind early in both contests. On Friday night the Bears jumped to an early lead when Brown center Shane Mudryk beat Stathos only two minutes, 18 seconds into the game. But junior center David Del Monte responded less than nine minutes later to tie the game by the close of the first period.

The Bears would not light the lamp for the remainder of the game, as sophomores center Scott Prime and right wing George Parros and senior right wing Shane Campbell would each notch unanswered goals in the 4-1 contest.

Whereas Princeton could count on a fairly easy game from ECAC cellar-dweller Brown, third-place Harvard posed a more significant threat. After a scoreless first stanza, the Crimson seemed to take control of the game with two goals in the second period.

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Less than two minutes before the end of the period, Harvard scored what could have been the backbreaker for the Tigers. Crimson right wing Rob Fried beat Stathos with a wrist shot to put Harvard up by two goals going into the final stanza. Now it was one of those do-or-die situations Stathos referred to.

Only 2:21 into the final period, junior left wing Brad Parsons skated toward the Crimson net with only Harvard defender Tim Stay in front of him. The Tiger beat Stay with a quick move and closed in on Crimson netminder Oliver Jonas. As he was falling to the ice, Parsons wristed the puck past Jonas for his 14th goal of the season.

A little more than halfway through the period, Campbell netted his second goal of the weekend, the equalizer that assured Princeton the tie, the seventh-place finish and a first-round matchup at fourth-place Cornell next weekend.

"We feel pretty good," Stathos said. "But it's not about the five-game unbeaten streak. We know how to get it done now. We go into the locker room down and we know we can finish."