Dartmouth women's hockey struggled through a tough weekend, falling 1-0 to Yale on Friday and tying Brown 3-3 on Saturday. Friday's loss was particularly painful, snapping a 20-year winning streak against the Bulldogs. On Saturday, Dartmouth jumped out to a 3-0 lead against Brown before giving up three goals in the third, the equalizer coming with just 19.6 seconds left on the clock.
The Big Green (9-9-4, 6-6-3 ECACHL) played well for a significant portion of the weekend. Its long stretches of solid play, however, were often nullified by lapses in focus and intensity.
Against Brown, Dartmouth dominated the opening minutes of competition so thoroughly that a blowout seemed inevitable. However, when the teams retook the ice for the second period, it looked as though they had traded jerseys at the break. Brown controlled play for much of the remaining 40 minutes.
Unfortunately for the Big Green, a lack of focus and determination also plagued the team in its Friday night match-up with Yale.
"We just weren't focused on playing our game," Shannon Bowman '09 said. "We were definitely on a high after the Harvard win on Monday, and maybe we went into tonight's game with too much confidence."
Dartmouth had reason to be confident coming into the Yale game. Its offense had poured in 16 goals in the previous three games, and it had allowed only a single goal to Harvard's highly touted offense over that same stretch. However, what the Big Green failed to recognize was that, for Yale, sometimes love is all you need.
The Big Green limited Yale to only 23 shots on goal, while managing to put 33 tries on net itself. Unfortunately, Yale senior goaltender Sarah Love had an answer to every Dartmouth challenge.
"Our goaltender was a big part of this game," Yale head coach Hillary Witt said.
Love, however, deflected much of the credit to her teammates.
"[The defensemen] kept the shots to the outside for the most part, and they were great about clearing out any rebounds I gave up," Love said.
The Yale blue liners managed to limit the opportunities of a very strong Dartmouth offense. While the Big Green did get some quality chances, Dartmouth also had to settle for a number of low-quality shots.
The Big Green didn't take many low-quality shots in the first period against Brown. The team came out firing, and after a pair of goals from Maggie Kennedy '09 and a tough tally from Julia Bronson '09, the team slipped into cruise control.
The Bears did the exact opposite and opened the second period looking nothing like a team down three goals.
"I sort of read them the riot act after the first period," Brown head coach Digit Murphy said.
"We talked about keeping focused, but we didn't," Dartmouth head coach Mark Hudak said. "They came out strong in the second period, and we panicked a little bit."
"We just made three really big mistakes in the third period," Hudak added.
While the first two Bear goals were tough to stomach, it looked as though the Big Green would still pull out a win. With two minutes remaining and Brown down a goal, the Bears fired a flurry of shots but were turned away repeatedly, until a shot was deflected over the goal and out of play.
Brown pulled its goalie on the ensuing face-off and put together a last ditch attempt to even the score. After controlling the draw, the Bears had a shot blocked by a sprawled out Meredith Batcheller '07, but Brown picked up the loose puck and put another shot on net. Carli Clemis '09 made the initial save, but Moore tapped the puck home to tie things up with 19.6 ticks left on the clock.
The controversy over the third goal, which the Big Green argued had been covered by Clemis before it was slapped into the net, reenergized the team, and Dartmouth dominated the overtime session, notching six shots in the first three minutes before Danielle Grundy '05 was hit with a checking penalty. Down a man for the remainder of the game, the Big Green held on for the tie.
Dartmouth won't have long to stew about the disappointing weekend. The Big Green next takes the ice on Friday at 7 p.m. against Quinnipiac.
