The Harvard offensive output shows that the Crimson has not fully mastered the exploitation, but it is started to prove itself quite adept at creating confusion.

About five minutes into the second period, a Brown defenseman tried to clear the puck along his own blueline. Before he could look up, senior winger Jamin Kerner attempted to steal the puck. Two more Crimson players, freshman winger Brett Nowak and senior defenseman Mark Moore, were right on Kerner's heels.

The tenacious cycle of pressure, which kept the puck in the Brown zone, eventually forced the puck deep to junior winger Harry Schwefel for a potential Crimson scoring chance.

The play was not really spectacular, and Schwefel did not get a good shot away if any, but it showed the seeds of a system developing that could make Harvard a very tough team.

Harvard started to perform the little things that it never really executed under former coach Ronn Tomassoni. Little things like a penalty kill during the second period, when freshman defenseman Aaron Kim simultaneously took out Duval and pushed the incoming pass out of the zone.

Kim, incidentally, had perhaps the best night of the Crimson rookies, logging as many minutes as the veterans and playing on the penalty kill and power play. He got the secondary assist on Schwefel's goal.

Throughout the night, the Harvard defense implemented the strategies learned by Assistant Coach Ron Rolston at Clarkson. The Crimson smartly positioned itself to deflect passes, block shots, and clear rebounds. Brown rarely had second shots, even if its first shots were extremely dangerous.

By no means was it perfect, and against a better team, the lapses in Harvard's execution of the system would have resulted in goals and a loss.