CHICAGO — Patient, strong, and stubborn, the University of Minnesota-Duluth on Thursday night needed more than 59 minutes to gain the upper hand on Harvard. When the Bulldogs finally got it, they turned it into a Frozen Four knockout punch.
Senior winger Alex Iafallo, skating free deep down the slot after the Crimson failed to clear a puck, zipped to the top of the crease and slipped a doorstep sleight-of-hand through the pads of goalie Merrick Madsen for a 2-1 win at the United the Center.
The goal, with 26.6 seconds remaining in regulation, sent the Bulldogs on to Saturday’s NCAA championship game here at the Madhouse on Madison. It also sent Harvard, a near-perfect 17-0-1 in its previous 18 games, home to the Yard, the distant sons of Bill Clearly unable to pick up what would have been the Ivy League school’s second national title.
“I saw the puck go left to right in front of me,” recounted Madsen, his club’s season coming to an abrupt end at 28-6-2. “And it turned into a little mini 2-on-1 there. I got over. I wanted to play the shot honest — and I did — I slid over and he put it against the grain a little more than I thought he would. I tried to squeeze my legs together and it pushed it in. It was that close the whole game.”
UMD, now 28-6-7, will play Denver here Saturday night for the title after the Pioneers routed Notre Dame, 6-1, in the other semifinal. The Crimson will fly back to Cambridge on Friday, having fallen two wins short of their quest after qualifying for the NCAA Tournament a third straight season.
“Pretty much every bit of ice was hard to get,” said Harvard coach Ted Donato, whose squad took a 1-0 lead late in the first period on Tyler Moy’s 22nd goal of the season. “I give Minnesota-Duluth a lot of credit for that. I thought both teams had a lot of good chances. But I thought in the first half of the game, I don’t think we were able to get out of our zone as cleanly as we would have liked and establish some offensive zone play. But in the second half the second and third, I thought we started to find our groove a little bit.”
The Bulldogs, who won the title in 2011, answered with the equalizer only 3:24 after Moy’s goal, Joey Anderson connecting with a long wrister after Dominic Toninato won a faceoff to the right of Madsen. Toninato pulled the puck to Anderson in the high slot, and the freshman right winger threaded his shot through a screen of three or four players, Madsen appearing to lose track of the puck on its journey some 45-50 feet in from the high slot.
After a scoreless second period, the two sides looked headed for OT until the Crimson, looking tired and cautious, twice failed to get the puck out of the zone in the final minute.
Luke Esposito, who ultimately would be the lone Crimson player in front of Iafallo, lamented that he could have made a crucial clear just before the Bulldogs struck for the winner.
“A play I’ll probably never forget,” said a somber Esposito. “I had the puck just inside the blue lined and I didn’t get it out.”
Esposito also was haunted by a shot of his own that came with the Harvard net empty and 2.9 seconds left on the clock. He fired from the left wing circle and his shot rang off the crossbar, missing by an inch or two the chance to send it into OT.
“I’m still in disbelief that it didn’t go in,” said Esposito, who scored 16 times this season and is one of seven seniors who won’t be back. “The whole last 30 seconds . . . I can’t believe it. We were unbelievable, really, getting down into their end and hitting three crossbars, or whatever it was . . . not the way you expect it to end. Not the way you expect any of this to end, but especially like that. It seems like there is a period left.”
The Crimson actually hit another post (Sean Malone) in the final flurry and came close to a third.
Much earlier in the period, it appeared Harvard had a 2-1 lead when Malone put the puck over Hunter Miska (38 saves) amid a scrum with 5:41 gone. Malone was there with teammates Moy and Esposito. The officiating crew immediately blew the play dead, no goal, despite what looked like a good goal on the big video board hanging over center ice.
After a three-minute review, the officiating crew stood by the call — no goal.
“Obviously, through my Harvard-colored glasses,” noted Donato, “it looked like a good goal. But everybody is trying to do their best out there.”
“The only thing I saw was the overhead [replay],” said Madsen, the junior who’ll return in 2017-18. “I didn’t get the reasoning, didn’t hear why it was called off. It looked good. I am a little biased. It looked clean to me.”
Play was halted some four minutes in the middle period after a big collision between Harvard’s Clay Anderson and UMD’s Kyle Osterberg. There was no call in real time, but the officials wanted another look on video, with Osterberg slow to get up after the big open-ice hit by Anderson.
Unlike the NHL, NCAA refs are allowed to review such plays, but only as a remedy in case they perhaps missed a major penalty. After the lengthy review, the referees were convinced the hit did not reach the level of five-minute transgression and play resumed with a faceoff in the Bulldogs’ end.
“The end was so sudden,” said Donato. “With hitting the post three times in the last 25 seconds. It’s really hard to describe.”
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.