It wasn’t the normal Boston University hockey road trip.

On Jan. 2 and 3, BU played two games at beautiful Mariucci Arena, home to the two-time defending NCAA champion University of Minnesota.

With its striking murals, Olympic-sized ice sheet and huge – to the tune of more than 10,000 – seating capacity, Mariucci actually rivals Walter Brown Arena in terms of character, and far exceeds the beloved BU rink in terms of comfort.

The concourse features a huge tribute to the late Herb Brooks, a former Minnesota coach, but more famously, the coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic team – “The Miracle On Ice” Team that featured four former Terriers and 10 former Gophers. And only in Minnesota could you spy the captain of that team, BU’s own Mike Eruzione, chatting it up with his Minnesotan comrade, Bill Baker.

Team pictures of every Gopher squad line the walls. Much like Walter Brown and the University of Maine’s Alfond Arena, the feel of Mariucci is simply hockey.

While on a much larger scale, expect Agganis Arena to be similar to Mariucci, at least in layout. Building an arena like Mariucci isn’t the hard part. Emulating the feel of a truly great hockey building like the Golden Gophers’ arena (and Alfond and the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore Center) will be the hard part for BU.

“Compared to a [New Hampshire] or Maine, it probably wasn’t even as loud, but it’s definitely bigger and I think they have more older fans and people who care about the program – they have more alumni,” said BU junior center Brian McConnell.

“It’s a great atmosphere, the fans in Minnesota are all good,” said junior center David Klema. “I think they understand the game a lot better than a lot of the fans out here. They’re not getting on the players about things they shouldn’t be getting on them for. They just understand the game more.

“It’s a lot different than a BU crowd,” Klema added. “It’s more of a BC crowd, an alumni crowd, but it’s really fun to play in front of 11,000 people.”

For Klema, the trip had added significance. He hails from Roseau, Minn., and many of the Gophers in maroon and gold were guys he has lined up with and against in the past.

“It was nice to be able to play in front of family and friends, and against a lot of friends,” Klema said. “I usually am not able to play with and against kids I grew up playing with.”

Klema is not the lone Minnesotan who returned home for the series. Sophomore defenseman Adam Dunlap, freshman goalie John Curry and freshman defenseman Tom Morrow all come from the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Morrow’s father, Brad, played for Brooks on the 1974 and 1976 national championship Gopher teams.

Klema’s father also played at Minnesota for one year. But Klema wasn’t exactly a die-hard ‘Sota supporter growing up.

“When I was really small, I guess I was kind of a Gophers fan,” Klema said. “Then I got older, and the coach from my high school went on to become the head coach at University of North Dakota – which is a lot closer than Minnesota – so I was more of a UND fan.

“There were a lot of guys from my town that played for UND and none who played for Minnesota,” he added. “As I got older, a lot of my friends who I grew up playing with from other towns on summer teams started committing to Minnesota and going there and it would have been fun to go there, but I decided I didn’t really want to, I wanted to get away from Minnesota.”

And Klema means it, too. As he dryly noted that the team only went to the movies on New Year’s Eve, Klema said, “I would have rather been in Boston for New Year’s Eve, to tell you the truth.”

While BU couldn’t bring a rowdy New Year’s celebration from the Hub to the Twin Cities, it did import one thing: hitting.

Noticeably less physical for much of this season, BU came out fired up in Minnesota, hitting anything that moved. Diminutive sophomore Brad Zancanaro laid perhaps the best hit of the weekend early in the first period on Friday night, laying out a Minnesota player on a beautiful open-ice shot.

Of course, BU had some bad physical moments as well. Sophomore defenseman Jekabs Redlihs, making his first appearance of the season, earned himself a game disqualification and a one-game suspension on a hit from behind on Minnesota captain Grant Potulny. While the punishment was deserved, the punishee, the good-natured Redlihs, wasn’t exactly the Terrier Most Likely to Be Booted. Indeed, rust can result in a bad hit. However, BU needed the physical play to make its presence known.

“After the game, a bunch of them came up to me and said, ‘you were by far the hardest team we’ve played against this year, you guys worked harder than any team we played against this year,'” Klema said.

“I was talking to a few guys after the game, and they weren’t usually used to hitting like that,” McConnell said. “Their rink is so much bigger, so I don’t think you get hit as much, but they definitely didn’t play as hard as we did.”

Dormant for much of the season, BU’s offense came alive, with McConnell, senior Mark Mullen and senior Frantisek Skladany, the guys that coach Jack Parker had said needed to step up on offense, each scoring multiple points. While goaltenders Sean Fields and Stephan Siwiec weren’t exactly clones of Martin Brodeur, they did a nice job against a superb Minnesota offense that featured a downright scary power play.

Altogether, the weekend was a success, with the Terriers gaining momentum by simply outworking their opponents. Unfortunately, they screeched to a halt after returning home last week. Losing to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2-1, at home, BU drew the fiery wrath of its coach and had to search for answers as to what happened to all the good.

“Minnesota is a very skilled team, but that’s all they were, they didn’t play hard,” Klema said. “I guess we played hard when we were out there, and we thought we played harder than we played. We thought we could give that effort against Hockey East and it would be the same outcome. We took the UMass game a little too lightly and didn’t understand what we were getting ourselves into, and it didn’t turn out how we wanted to.”

Going into the third period of its next game two days later against Northeastern University down 3-2, BU looked 20 minutes away from another nail in this season’s coffin. However, 20 strong minutes saw the Terriers tie the game up, and when Bryan Miller’s overtime goal gave BU a 4-3 win, some hope for 2004 was salvaged.

While this Terrier team has been an enigma all year, it can learn much from the performance out west, but as the players saw, they cannot rest on those performances alone. While the trip to Minneapolis only lasted a few short days, the Terriers are still learning from it. BU fans can only hope that those lessons inspire a stronger showing in 2004 than in the last few months of 2003.