Harvard’s Winning Streak Comes to an End in 4-1 Loss to No. 12 Cornell

Harvard men’s ice hockey (11-8-1, 9-5-0 ECAC) stumbled to a 4-1 loss against the No. 12 Cornell Big Red (14-5-0, 9-3-0 ECAC) to complete its upstate N.Y. road trip.

A raucous crowd filled the stands at Lynah Rink for Cornell’s reunion weekend festivities, cheering on its steadily dominant Cornell team as it snapped Harvard’s four-game win streak.

The Crimson’s sophomore goaltender Ben Charette stood tall in the first period, but Harvard’s defense failed to reset following the opening goal and could not recover.

For a Cornell team that’s 10-1-0 at home and a Harvard squad that’s won four straight, the first period was largely uneventful.

Play shifted back and forth as both teams tried to set up in the offensive zone, but neither team could get the puck away from the perimeter and generate quality shots toward the net.

The most action-packed moments were on the power play for the Big Red, which, for a brief time, extended to a 5-on-3 opportunity.

Cornell managed to get a few shots on net during the power play, but Harvard’s penalty kill and stellar goaltending stepped up to keep the game scoreless.

The Crimson still boasts the best penalty kill in the country, 1.5 percentage points better than second-place Union College, a team Harvard shut out last Monday.

Momentum from the kill led the Crimson to draw a penalty of its own, an interference call that opened the second period.

Harvard did little to convert on the power play, and with energy from the kill, Cornell began to set a more physical tone and maintain the puck on offense.

That quick change in momentum was enough to rattle the Crimson, allowing the Big Red’s offensive pressure to continue to build.

Three goals in quick succession for Cornell to end the second period blew the game open, threatening to put the game away with 20 minutes to go, similarly to how Harvard played last night against Colgate.

In just seven minutes, the Crimson allowed as many goals as it had in its previous four games. Whereas Harvard scored 14 goals over its past four contests, tonight it only tallied one.

The first two periods put Charette in a difficult position to make a save.

Cornell’s junior forward Jake Kraft, who scored his third goal in two games, was left in a wide-open one-on-one with Charette and managed to hit the top left corner.

Then, just 26 seconds later, a lucky rebound put the puck on junior defenseman George Fegaras’s stick, who fired through traffic to score on Charette, who was screened by Cornell’s forwards in the slot.

The lone bright spot for Harvard thus far was its performance in the faceoff circle against the nation’s best team, winning 56 percent of the puck drops.

Unfortunately for the Crimson, by the time it figured out how to successfully win faceoffs, it already trailed on the scoreboard and, by the middle of the third period, faced an 11-shot deficit.

Harvard’s offense still couldn’t create the chances it had in the first period, which only put more pressure on the defensive side of the puck to stay clean in the final minutes.

With 1:05 remaining in the second, the Big Red’s freshman forward Aiden Long scored his first goal in six games on a shot coming down the right side of the ice that trickled past Charette’s outstretched arm.

Harvard’s only source of hope came moments after its third power play, when sophomore forward Mick Thompson scored on a one-timer from the top-left point.

Cornell’s fourth goal, just 47 seconds later, however, prevented Harvard from building any offensive momentum from Thompson’s goal, distracting the Crimson from the sophomore’s achievement of tallying six points in five games.

Unable to control the pace for much of the game, Harvard had to rely on the empty net advantage to work the puck around the offensive zone with three minutes to play.

Adding insult to injury, a backhanded assist from behind the net by Thompson to Heikki Ruohonen got past the Cornell goaltender but was overturned after a lengthy coach’s challenge because the play was deemed offside.

With that detrimental call, the Crimson fell 4-1 in the second game of the road trip.

Harvard will roll into an easier week of its 2025-26 campaign, beginning with a single home game next Saturday versus Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

The team will then face more spread-out contests, enabling more recovery time, including the Beanpot and subsequent ECAC matchups, with upcoming single-game weekends.

The game against RPI starts at 7:00 p.m. EST and is available to stream on ESPN+, while puck drop for the Beanpot semifinal game against No. 15 Boston College begins at 5:00 p.m. EST at TD Garden and can be streamed on NESN.

—Staff writer Nate M. Bolan can be reached at [email protected].