Moments that made UConn's season magical (part two)

Read part one here.

No single game better highlighted the strides UConn made from the season prior than Harvard. Four days into the new year, the Huskies traveled to Boston and spent much of the first two periods doing pretty much everything wrong.

UConn started slow and fell behind 2-0 after just three minutes. It battled back to tie the game, then allowed another goal and went into the second intermission down 3-2.

Beyond the score, there were plenty of issues on the ice. Callum Tung let in two soft goals. Joey Muldowney was benched for a few shifts due to poor play. Players were freelancing instead of sticking to the game plan.

A year prior, UConn would’ve packed it in and suffered an ugly defeat. But the Huskies remained resolute and didn’t allow the mistakes to fester. When they went into the locker room at the second intermission, head coach Mike Cavanaugh didn’t blow his top. Instead, he delivered a clear, calm message.

“I'm not even upset right now. You guys are just gonna throw this one away and you guys are gonna regret this one. That's all I have to say,” he told the team, as relayed by Hudson Schandor. “You guys are way too good to lose a game like this.”

The message resonated. “Yeah, he’s exactly right,” Schandor remembers feeling afterwards.

Everyone responded. Tung flushed the early goals and turned away all nine shots in the third. Muldowney hit the reset button after his benching and tallied a pair of goals — the first of which came on the power play.

It was a critical inflection point for the unit. Coming in, UConn had converted at just a 15.4 percent clip, scoring just eight times in 17 games. The first man-advantage at Harvard didn’t inspire much confidence after getting up-ended by an off-script play from one of its key players.

“I love Jake Richard but I don’t know what he was doing on the [initial] power play,” Helton said. “He did something that was completely rogue.”

The coach let the sophomore hear it when he got to the bench.

“Are we gonna do what we talked about or not?” Helton told him.

The Huskies didn’t get another power play opportunity until 19 seconds remained in the second period. The intermission didn’t disrupt the unit’s momentum — 33 seconds after play resumed, Muldowney ended up free in the slot and blasted home a one-timer to tie the game.

It was exactly how Helton drew it up.

“We did [what we talked about] and we scored,” he said. “That was something we worked on quite a bit and we finally did it.”

It was the type of buy-in that UConn never had in 2023-24. The Huskies ultimately put up five goals in the third period at Harvard en route to a 7-3 victory. As for the power play, it went on to score in 16 of the next 17 games, lighting the lamp 19 times in total.

‘Belief with evidence’

UConn started 2025 with three straight wins, though the competition wasn’t exactly fierce. Harvard finished four games below .500 and 38th in Pairwise while UNH picked up just one win over its next 13 games after getting swept by the Huskies.

They were taking care of business against bad teams but hadn’t proven themselves against elite competition. That would change with a trip to Maine’s Alfond Arena — one way or another.

“I said, “This will be the true test. Let's see where we stack up,” Cavanaugh remembered.

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