It’s time for the men’s hockey team to get down to business; the Red will end the non-conference part of its season and face off against Union tonight in Schenectady.

It will finish up the weekend against another central New York team, Rensselaer.

Cornell (11-1-3, 6-0-2 ECAC Hockey) has not lost in eight games; the Red went 7-0-1 during that time span. The last time the team lost was on November 11 at the University of North Dakota.

Cornell is ranked second in the ECAC Hockey League behind Princeton. Union (11-8-1, 4-4-0) is seventh and Rensselaer (4-15-2,3-5-1), is eighth. Union evened its conference record last weekend with impressive wins over Princeton and Quinnipiac.

With four wins and one tie over the break, the men’s hockey team reenters conference play this weekend with a month’s worth of uninterrupted momentum. The Red (11-1-3, 6-0-2 ECAC Hockey) just swept Niagara over the weekend at Lynah Rink to close out the 2008-09 non-conference slate.

The Kennedy brothers led the way for Cornell, with senior co-captain Michael and sophomore Patrick both notching a goal apiece in both Friday and Saturday’s games. With his second goal of the weekend, his seventh of the season, the elder Kennedy tied junior co-captain Colin Greening for the team lead in scoring — echoing the success against Niagara that Kennedy has enjoyed in the past.

Scrivens shut out the Purple Eagles on Friday, 3-0, and the Red held on to a 2-1 lead the next night at Lynah.

Listening to head coach Mike Schafer ’86 speak about the Clarkson Golden Knights, you cannot tell whether he is referring to last year’s team, which finished atop the ECAC Hockey standings, or this year’s club, which currently shares a spot in the conference basement with three other squads. Nevertheless, for its final two home games of 2008, the Red will host Clarkson tonight and St. Lawrence tomorrow evening. Both games are slated for a 7 p.m. faceoff at Lynah Rink.

A recent trend for the men’s hockey team has been to give up a few too many goals in highly-anticipated non-conference contests over Thanksgiving break, as the Red fell to Boston University in Madison Square Garden last year, 6-3. At unranked North Dakota this break, No. 12 Cornell suffered another Thanksgiving rout on Friday, 7-3, but came back to win the next day, 2-1.

“It was very similar to [Boston University], even in the score,” said senior forward Evan Barlow. “Madison Square Garden … seemed to go by really fast, and it was the same with Game 1 [at North Dakota]. We had a chance to settle in in Game 2, and it would probably have been the same if we played Boston University [a second time].”'

For the second year in a row, the men’s hockey team will spend its Thanksgiving break playing in one of the premier hockey facilities in the country. After suffering a 6-3 loss last year at the hands of Boston University at New York City’s iconic Madison Square Garden, a more experienced Red (4-0-2) is looking for a better result during this vacation — this year, Cornell will head to Grand Forks, N.D., to face North Dakota, a school which has made it to the Frozen Four in each of the last four years.

The Fighting Sioux’s Ralph Engelstad Arena, which opened in 2001, has a capacity of over 11,000 and will host a pair of games with the Red — the first on Friday at 8:30 p.m. (EST) and the second 8 p.m. (EST) the next day.

The men’s hockey team had little trouble on Saturday night stopping a red-hot Dartmouth squad that was riding a five-game winning streak. Senior forward and co-captain Michael Kennedy’s power play goal just 2:38 into the game gave the Red a lead it wouldn’t relinquish, as Cornell went on to score twice more and take the victory, 3-1.

Standing in the middle of Section B as the final minutes ticked off Lynah’s scoreboard on both Friday and Saturday night, I felt a nostalgic electricity reverberating through the student sections that seeped its way around the rink. I imagined that Lynah Rink once bore witness to this contemporary anomaly every evening its famed and feared ice hockey team laced up their skates. Scenes of students shuffling on the wooden bleachers before 7 p.m., of chest painted diehards who brave the tundra-like conditions, of 60 minutes of nonstop enthusiasm from the Faithful and townies alike, and of a domination of our Hahvahd and Dartmouth rivals flooded my mind amid visions of seasons past.

Riley Nash could not have picked a better time to break his scoring drought. The sophomore center buried his first two goals of the early 2008-09 campaign — helping Cornell edge Harvard, 2-1, in front of 4,267 raucous Cornell supporters Friday night at Lynah Rink. The victory snapped the Crimson’s four-game winning streak in the bitter Ithaca-Cambridge rivalry.

“It’s nice to see Riley score a couple of goals and relieve some of the pressure on him,” said head coach Mike Schafer ’86. “There’s no question he was pressing. I think any offensive player takes a lot of pride in wanting to score goals. He’s had his chances and tonight it was nice for him to get us a couple [goals].”

Tonight and tomorrow, Lynah Rink will host what could be two of the most crucial home games for the Red this year. Tonight, the Red (2-0-2, 2-0-2 ECACH Hockey) will square off against the visiting Harvard Crimson (4-2-1, 4-2-1) in what will be the 129th meeting in this bitter historic rivalry. Tomorrow, a Dartmouth team (4-2-0, 4-1) that is tied for second in ECAC Hockey will come to Ithaca for a 7 p.m. matchup.

In its home opener, the men’s hockey team did not get off to the start that it had envisioned. Cornell went down 2-0 to the visiting Colgate Raiders, but scored two goals in a span of 24 seconds in the third period to square the game at 2-2, earning one point in the tie.

“We hadn’t been behind in any games yet this year,” said junior goaltender Ben Scrivens. “I thought for the most part we responded well.”

Power this: Junior co-captain Colin Greening scored one of the Red’s two goals in the team’s 2-2 tie with Colgate Saturday night.