In a cluttered corner of The Daily Free Press office, there is a tattered piece of paper scotch-taped onto a wall. The sheet is a photocopied column from the FreeP earlier this decade, written in an era that was evidently a dark time for Terrier hockey and sports journalism alike.
The piece didn’t begin with any sort of carefully-crafted wording or a preface of any kind, but rather got things started with about as blunt an introduction as you can find: ‘The hockey team sucks.’
I’m not using this example to poke fun or to ridicule for the sake of shock value and utter hilarity. I still love peering over my right shoulder to read that line any time I get the chance ‘-‘- in all seriousness, it never gets old.
The real reason that I bring up the old column is because the sentiment that it expresses is one that seemed to make its way back to Commonwealth Avenue last week, before BU’s triumph over Michigan on Saturday night.
At that point in the very, very early season, I think most BU hockey fans could reasonably acknowledge that the team hadn’t gotten off to what would be considered to be an ideal start; in fact, anybody who believed otherwise after the first few games may just be the kind of person or fan who thought that the XFL was a great idea ‘-‘- someone not entirely with the program.
After all, there was obviously reason for concern surrounding the state of Terrier hockey, right?
The two-game exhibition season featured uninspiring showings against St. Francis Xavier and the U.S. National Under-18 Team, but freaking out over these glorified scrimmages really does you much more harm than good.
What those exhibition games did do, though, was begin to raise concerns about this team and what they are capable of doing this season.
As fans, you tend to have a cautiously optimistic, hoping for the best while having an unsettling feeling deep inside of you. Many of us hoped (or even went as far to assume) that a majority of the problems would go by the wayside with the start of the regular season, but at the same time wondered whether these shortcomings that were displayed were actually inherent flaws.
The first two games of the season didn’t do much at all to curb any of these doubts; if anything, the season-opening loss on the road at UMass and the home-opening defeat against Notre Dame caused these aforementioned doubts to mushroom into something entirely different.
You could hear discontent. People with shell-shocked looks on their faces were littered throughout the student sections. And you could ever hear a collection of whispers, voices that put together magnified into a resounding opinion: ‘Wow, we suck.’
While ‘suck’ wouldn’t be what I would call the best choice of words, these weren’t exactly unsubstantiated claims.
Replacing last year’s back line of Matt Gilroy and Brian Strait has proven to be harder than most people anticipated, seeing as the BU defense has proven to be a glaring weakness thus far.
Kieran Millan hasn’t been bad per se, but continued inconsistent play from him will make it very hard to replicate his revelation of a season from last year, especially with a defense that has been nothing more than mediocre thus far.
The Terriers’ ability to score and generate offense on the power play had been absolutely dreadful, highlighted in the embarrassing 3-0 loss to the Fighting Irish.
Undoubtedly, some of these defects may seem insurmountable, but there’s no reason why people should completely give up on this team.
Just as many of us sports fans have a sense of cautious optimism about us, we also have a tendency to fall victim to spur-of-the-moment decisions and snap judgments.’ Saying that the BU hockey team sucks and abandoning hope altogether for the season are examples of these things and as history in any sport (college hockey included) has shown us, there is always time to turn things around, particularly in a season that doesn’t even end until the spring.
This was evidenced last Saturday with the Terriers’ 3-2 win over a top-five Michigan team at Agganis. Millan played a great game in goal, the offense regained some momentum, and while the defense was still suspect and the team wasn’t that spectacular as a whole, a win is a win, and at this juncture in the season, I think we’d all be hard-pressed to be overly critical of a victory over a top-flight opponent.
What this first set of games has provided is an opportunity for Terrier fans to take a step back and re-assess their expectations for the season. Does this BU hockey team suck? Absolutely not, there’s too much talent on that roster to allow them to dwell in the cellar of Hockey East for the entire year, and we have to remember to be patient.
But this squad has also revealed a lot of its pitfalls and has done nothing to prove that they deserved to be a preseason top-10, let alone top-five team. Maybe I’m falling under the premature judgment category here, but it’s also not a team we should expect to see win the conference title or make the Frozen Four, at least based on what has been demonstrated thus far.
The state of BU hockey at the moment is one of reconsideration, one that demands a middle ground from fans and followers who may be experiencing something of an emotional roller-coaster this year from a team that has proven to be mercurial, but should never be judged or counted out too quickly.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
