“We play very good defense, but that doesn’t mean we want to play defense,” Stone said.
But for all of the Crimson’s shots in the second, it was the Engineers who came away with a goal.
Seven minutes into the period, a trio of Rensselaer players broke towards the goal, catching co-captain Kathryn Farni in an odd-man rush.
Gersten wound up with the puck on her stick and placed it in the top right corner of the net for the 3-1 lead.
But Harvard hung tough, picking up its offensive game in the third to create its best scoring chances of the contest.
The Crimson’s top line had plenty of looks at the net, including one from junior Katharine Chute mid-period that required a beauty of a glove save from Ramelot. And with 3:40 left in the game, the line’s chemistry finally translated into results.
Dempsey brought the puck up the left side of the ice and unleashed a shot. Ramelot made the initial save, but Buesser was there to slam home the rebound.
“Dempsey, I think she had like four people on her and was able to finagle her way out of there,” Buesser said. “Every player knows that if you shoot for the far pad it will pretty much go right out to the middle, and it rebounded right to me.”
With the score 3-2, Stone pulled Bellamy with just under a minute to play. But Harvard couldn’t net the equalizer, and with 30 ticks left on the clock, Engineer Alisa Harrison scored an empty-netter to secure the win for Rensselaer.
Bellamy made nine saves in the third on her way to a career-best 25-save performance. She will get plenty of chances to top that mark, though, as senior Christina Kessler’s season is over due to injury.
“I’m sure she’d like a couple back, but [Bellamy] did a real good job in the third period keeping us in the game,” Stone said. “She’s got to grow up fast, and she needs to take advantage of this opportunity. You’ve got to look at it as an opportunity, you can’t look at it as a bummer.”
But with just seven league games remaining, the Crimson will need to play better from top to bottom to maintain its third-place conference seat.
“I don’t think we played how we wanted to play by any stretch of the imagination,” Buesser said. “We’ve got to get back to practice and start playing the way we know how to play.”
—Staff writer Kate Leist can be reached at kleist@fas.harvard.edu.