Box Score NEW HAVEN, Conn.  – The Yale Women's Hockey Team is 8-4 over its last dozen games and has a chance to earn its second ever home playoff series. Today, the Bulldogs had a chance to tie a program record for wins in a season but ran into the nation's No. 1 team and fell to Cornell 5-1 at Ingalls Rink.
 
Yale's five seniors – Laura Anderson, Kirsten Nergaard, Tera Hofmann, Saroya Tinker and Sophie Veronneau - were honored before the game, and three of them helped the Bulldogs take a 1-0 lead seven minutes into the second period. Nergaard got the tally with assists from Anderson and Tinker, and the team started to pour on the shots to test Cornell goalie Lindsay Browning.
 
However, the contest turned on a controversial, second-period call involving Nergaard and a Big Red blueliner resulting in a four-on-four situation and the first of the top-ranked team's five straight tallies. One of those goals came near the end of a five-minute advantage, Cornell's only power-play goal.
 
This is a very different Yale team than the one that lost 6-0 to the Big Red (23-1-3, 17-0-3) at Ithaca in November, and the final score was no indication of the way this game was played. The Bulldogs grabbed two points last night by coming from behind to grab a 5-3 win against Colgate, further evidence of their ascension under Mark Bolding, the first-year Susan Cavanagh Yale Head Coach. That win also tied the program's record for conference wins in a season with 12.
 
In the Yale net today, Hofmann made 20 saves, including nine in both the first and second periods and did not allow a power-play tally on five of six attempts.
 
The Elis (15-12-0, 12-8-0), who have clinched a playoff spot and are in fifth place in the ECAC standings with one weekend left in the regular season, skate at Quinnipiac and Princeton next week with hopes of earning a top-four spot. Yale can finish the regular season anywhere from fourth to seventh place.