It just couldn’t have been easy.
After a season like the one the 2007-08 Boston University men’s ice hockey team has endured, skating through the Hockey East quarterfinals with a sweep just wouldn’t have been challenging enough.
They had to push their collective backs up against the wall before they could take it to the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and play like the hottest team in the country since the Beanpot.
They had to wait until nine minutes into the first period, already in a two-goal crevice, before they could come out and play like the team that rattled off a seven-game winning streak during the season’s most pivotal stretch.
But then, that’s just the way these Terriers do business. They waited until they had fallen all the way to seventh place in the league standings on January 26 after a weekend sweep at the hands of the University of New Hampshire, to turn it on and go 12-2-0 in their last fourteen league games, storming into the playoffs as the No. 2 team in the league.
And last night, in a win or go home predicament, they waited until it seemed like there was almost no hope left.
“First thing that popped into my head was just, ‘This cannot be happening right now,'” said co-captain Pete MacArthur of the team’s early two-goal deficit. “‘There’s no way my last game’s going to be on home ice in the quarterfinals.'”
But then, just as they had done in early February when all signs were pointing to an early end to BU’s season, they leaned up against that wall and pushed back.
BU coach Jack Parker called a rare first period time-out, gathered his team, and released a calming message.
“I just said ‘Boys, we’ve got to relax here,'” Parker said. “I called the timeout just to say ‘Hey guys, there’s plenty of time to go here, all we’ve got to do is play hockey but we’re not, we’re panicking.'”
And then, everything changed. Gone was the Terrier team that a seventh-seeded Lowell had outplayed the night before. Gone were the 4-10-2 first-semester Terriers who were beginning to rear their ugly heads. It suddenly seemed like there was no reason to panic. BU was the No. 2 seed, Lowell was the No. 7, and that’s just the way things were meant to be.
“We didn’t get rattled after the second one,” MacArthur said. “We just said ‘Alright, we’re in a hole, we’ve been in a hole all year.’ We’ve had our backs against the wall all year – and we fought out of it all year – and we did the same thing tonight.”
And fight they did, scoring just 59 seconds after the timeout and adding two more before the end of the frame to take a 3-2 lead into the locker room at the first intermission. The calming feeling coming over most of the Terrier faithful, wondering what all the panicking had been for, was likely eerily familiar to the feeling that has rippled up and down Commonwealth Avenue over the last six weeks – when it’s win or go home, this Terrier team can come to play.
The game, just one of 39 the Terriers have played this season, was the epitome of a season summary: wait, wait, wait, turn it on.
“We’ve got a lot of character in our room,” explained BU goalie Brett Bennett. “We’ve had a lot of come-from-behind victories, including one against Lowell which was huge. It’s just a team with a lot of character and we believe in ourselves.”
Where the season sits now, it’d be hard for the Terriers not to believe in themselves. Simply put, they were nearly a lost cause in late January – fighting for a playoff slot – let alone home-ice advantage or a shot at the conference semifinal game.
And in the first period last night, coming off a disheartening 4-1 loss to the River Hawks on Saturday night, they were nearly lost once again.
“First I’d like to congratulate BU,” said UML coach Blaise MacDonald at the start of his post-game press conference. “I thought their backs were against the wall tonight, especially being down 2-0, they fought back and they’re a program that plays the right way, plays with a lot of class and integrity and a lot of grit and they deserve to move on.”
“Deserve” is a touchy word in sports but glancing back at where they came from, if the Terriers didn’t earn the privilege of moving onto the semi’s there’s no other way they could be there. Not this year.