The Boston University hockey team went to the locker room only to pick up its bags and drag them down the Agganis Arena hallway to the unadorned, benches-and-hangers auxiliary locker room.
The stretching took place in the hallway. No music, no stationary bikes, none of the accoutrements that the team has enjoyed since moving to Agganis Arena in 2005. Just a mock-hostile away atmosphere, mimicking the environment where BU has thrived this year, compared to its anemic play at home.
BU coach Jack Parker considered creating the road-game atmosphere Thursday night, but opted not to. Then, BU skated around the Agganis ice for 60 minutes and got “out-willed” by Vermont in the first game of the Hockey East quarterfinals, in Parker’s words – putting the Terriers one loss away from being eliminated from the conference playoffs.
“We just wanted to change up their routine at home, because if you look at our season this year, we’ve been a very, very good team on the road and a very, very poor team at home,” Parker said. “It has to do something with their psyche, how they get prepared for games.”
Whatever psychological effect Parker wanted to bring about, it worked. The 2-0 win over Vermont on Friday night wasn’t explosive, it wasn’t an exclamation mark, but it was punctuation. On a night when Boston College scored seven goals and New Hampshire scored six, BU’s two-goal showing didn’t make anybody run for cover. But the Terriers worked. Hard. And they showed, again, their ability to grind out a win in a hockey game in which neither team budges.
The win sends the series to a decisive third game, at Agganis tonight (7 p.m.). For the Catamounts (18-15-5), it’s a must-win to keep the season alive; for BU, the stakes are a bit more complex.
On Thursday, the Terriers (19-8-9) placed themselves in danger of being eliminated not only from the Hockey East tournament, but possibly the NCAA tournament. Looking like a lock for the NCAAs two weeks ago, ranked No. 5, a string of three losses and lackluster play put the season in jeopardy. But from the beginning Friday, BU solidified its status as a team worthy of ice-time through late March, and should now find itself in the NCAAs.
The Terriers came out and flung 15 shots at Vermont goalie Joe Fallon in the first period, including a few from right around the crease. The shots came from everybody, and finally found a way to net, after Vermont had blocked a quarter of BU’s shots a night prior.
The shots only tell part of the story. BU flew around, keeping the puck in the Vermont zone and keeping the Catamounts off the puck. All the individual battles that had gone to Vermont a night before started tending toward BU.
“Everybody on my club responded to a bad effort last night,” Parker said. “That first period was one of our best periods, if not our best period of the year, here. To come out and play as hard as we did was an indication of them wanting to go and change this around.
“Probably what had more to do with our playing well tonight was the way Vermont embarrassed us last night,” he added. “They slapped us upside the head pretty good. Not on the scoreboard, just in the difference in how hard they played and how hard we played.”
The clearest difference in the last two games came in individual efforts. In the three games before Friday, the Terriers had gone without a whole lot of electrifying moments. People stood around, waiting for a spark to arrive. Friday, the whole lineup seemed to be willing to shoulder the burden of getting this team back to form.
“The guys knew it was coming down to crunch-time, and you gotta leave it all on the ice,” said BU captain Sean Sullivan. “Coach made us realize that. He said a couple things in the locker room, but I think guys really looked at themselves in the mirror and said they gotta give all for the guys next to them.”
The first goal stemmed from a chain of individual victories, right at a time when BU needed to reverse the flow of the game.
Vermont had held BU shotless for the first 9:44 of the second, as the Catamounts reined in the game. A penalty on BU’s Dan McGoff two minutes into the second provided a chance for the momentum to turn, and it did. Though not a whole lot.
Vermont only managed one real opportunity, which ended when Kenny Macauley’s shot from in-close 15 seconds into the power play hit BU goalie John Curry low on his mask and died in front of the goalie.
“We got away from what we’re doing [in the first],” Parker said. “We were hanging onto the puck a little too long. We were turning pucks over, and they forechecked a little harder. We made some bad reads. But, in general, it was a matter of us not advancing the puck.”
Then, with just over 10 minutes left in the period, Chris Higgins took the puck on the right boards and cruised toward the net. He faked to his right, and Mark Lutz bit. All of Mark Lutz bit. Higgins deked back to center, and Lutz’s only chance was to throw a stick out and trip the sophomore, which he did, and which he was whistled for.
Then, 1:15 into the man-advantage, which had to that point looked comatose, Higgins deflected a clear from a Vermont defenseman. The puck fluttered into the air, and Brandon Yip snared it just in front of the blue line on the left side.
He collected the puck and fired a pass to Pete MacArthur in the right slot. MacArthur then uncorked a one-timer that pierced the zone and dove into the far, low side of the net, beating Fallon’s pad.
“It’s just unfortunate. We did a great job on the kill,” said Vermont coach Kevin Sneddon. “We had the puck on our stick with a chance to clear, and we unfortunately don’t. But MacArthur’s shot was an NHL one-timer.”
No story on individual efforts could overlook Curry (29 saves). The senior notched his 13th career shutout, which ties the BU record, and his national-best seventh shutout of the season. He allowed fewer dangerous rebounds than he had in the past two weeks, though some still bounced off his pads.
But a star goalie who had not been quite as lustrous lately regained some glow, as he fended off 15 shots from Vermont in the final frame.
“I felt good, but they didn’t get a lot of opportunities [early],” Curry said. “Just the way the game developed, we decided that with 10 minutes left, we were going to win this game 1-0.”
Kenny Roche took a boarding penalty just 17 seconds into the third, and Vermont attacked, getting three open shots on net on the man-advantage that Curry sent away. Then, with just over 12 minutes left, a slapshot from the left slot from Colin Vock and a wide-open backhand from the doorstep ended up in Curry’s possession.
“Curry played fantastic,” Sneddon said. “He looked a lot more confident tonight than he did last night. Pucks weren’t hitting him and coming off of him as much as we thought they would. He did a nice job of smothering all the initial shots.”
Vermont missed its biggest chance a minute later. A BU turnover on the back boards went out to Corey Carlson all alone in front. He fired high, beating a flopped-sideways Curry, but the puck ricocheted off the crossbar.
The pressure stayed on until, with 6:08 left in the game, BU defenseman Brian Strait wrested a shot from the blue line. Seemingly harmless at first, as the lines went to change, the wrister beat a screened Fallon to the top-right corner, throwing the energy back to BU and draining it from Vermont.
“That kind of demoralized them,” Sullivan said. “We had the momentum after that, and we took it and ran with it. That’s what we gotta do tomorrow night.”
In a series as tight as this one, tonight will come down to whichever team has the focus and conditioning left after two grueling games.
Said Sneddon: “You find the energy this time of year.”