GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – The last shift of every season is reserved for seniors. Whether the year ends in the regular season, the first round of the NCAA Tournament or the national championship, that final shift is the culmination of everything that is and was over four unforgettable years.
It’s the period to a career, to a way of life, to a family.
And while that last skate is a bittersweet moment if it ends in a ring, for 99 percent of seniors, there’s nothing sweet about it. Each one knows that when that last minute is over, there’s no turning back.
So every year, a new batch of seniors faces the facts that soon, their numbers will no longer be their own, their sweaters destined for new faces come October.
But for one ultimate shift, it’s all theirs.
The seniors of the 2006-07 Boston University squad didn’t want that feeling to come Friday night – no one ever does. But when captain Sean Sullivan, assistant captain Kenny Roche and defenseman Kevin Schaeffer joined goalie John Curry on the Van Andel Arena ice Saturday morning nearing 1:00 a.m. – down 5-1 to a third-seeded Michigan State team that, on paper, seemed eerily similar – they were missing two of their own.
One, forward Eric Thomassian, was a healthy scratch. The other, defenseman Tom Morrow, watched his classmates take their farewell shift from the depths of a foreign locker room, the victim of a miscall that slapped him with a game misconduct and sent him packing 26 minutes too early. It was a call (for a check from behind actually committed by sophomore Brandon Yip) that brought the career of the 6-foot-7 Morrow to an abrupt and unjust end, denying him his well-deserved final bow.
So for 54 seconds, half of Boston University’s senior class skated, and skated hard, heads held as high as they could muster, trying to ignore the impending loss the Spartans were seconds from handing them.
And when it was all over and done with, as the reality of finished seasons and ended careers set in with crushing brutality, there was a team of 26 guys – all friends, all family – left wondering what could have – and maybe should have – been.
“When we were in [the locker room after], it’s tough,” said a red-eyed Sullivan after the game. “It’s 25 of my best friends, and I’ll never be on the team again. I was just going around shaking guys’ hands. It’s tough, guys are all upset, the way we worked in practice, over the summer – we feel we deserved better.”
But Friday night’s NCAA first-round bout, delayed over an hour after fourth-seeded Alabama-Huntsville took top-ranked Notre Dame into double overtime, didn’t seem as though it would end this way after the first 10 minutes.
The Terriers (20-10-9) came out uncharacteristically offensive-minded against their CCHA opponent, a Spartan team (24-13-3) who seemed to mirror BU in nearly every way.
BU’s lineup was back to full strength – Schaeffer rejoined his squad after missing the Hockey East playoffs with a sprained right knee, junior winger Pete MacArthur was concussion-free after taking a crushing hit against Boston College a week earlier and sophomore defenseman Matt Gilroy was skating after feeling ill most of the day – and the Terriers were flying early, getting scoring chances from every line.
BU dominated territorially, laying in wait for a goal that seemed inevitably near.
They almost found it off a faceoff at 5:28, when center Jason Lawrence dropped the puck to Roche, who sent a slapshot careening off the crossbar behind 5-foot-6 goalie Jeff Lerg (27 saves).
But it would take just 37 seconds more for BU to come through on their offensive promise. With 13:55 still to play in the first, Gilroy carried the puck up middle ice and into the zone. As he crossed the blue line, Gilroy passed the puck off to an unlikely hero – hard-nosed winger Ryan Weston.
Skating in hard on Lerg, Weston’s shot hit the goalie’s stick and popped into the air for the junior to bat into the upper-right corner for the 1-0 lead.
“It hit my stick when he deked and all of a sudden I saw him celebrate,” Lerg said. “I didn’t know how it got in. I thought I stopped it.”
The tally was Weston’s second of the season, and the Terriers’ reward for opening the matchup by out-shooting MSU, 9-0. The team looked cool, composed and confident – something not seen in BU since starting the 2007 on an 11-1-4 run.
“When a guy like Weston scores, everyone feels happy for him,” Curry (21 saves) said. “He’s just a great guy, works really hard, and he doesn’t score quite as much as he deserves probably. But that’s the type of effort we needed, for guys to chip in and step up and score.”
But after BU got on the board, the control quickly fell to the Spartans. Seconds into a 4-on-3 advantage with 7:09 left in the period, MSU first-liner Tim Kennedy evened the score at 1-1, with the help of some timely puck luck.
Winning a battle behind the net, BU defenseman Eric Gryba sent the puck around the boards to clear the zone. But a fluky bounce off an edge in the wall put the puck right onto Kennedy’s stick.
“I thought we played extremely well in the first period, moving the puck well, getting some opportunities, getting a goal and playing exactly the way we’d like to play,” said BU coach Jack Parker. “We give up a goal in the first period about halfway through on the power play on our man-down when we did everything right, we drilled it out of the zone, but it hit [the boards] and popped back out to him. In general, you can’t help that, that’s just a bad bounce for us.”
And while neither team knew it, that bad bounce – something that’s happened to the Terriers all season – permanently shifted the momentum of the game. Despite Curry rejecting his first shot, Kennedy stuck with the play, scooping the rebound inside the right post and into top netting.
The Terriers got out of the period clutching a slight mental edge, an advantage that wouldn’t last two minutes into the second frame.
“The first period was the most tired I’ve been all year,” Kennedy said. “They came out flying and that’s the most all year that [a team] just hit us. I didn’t think I was gonna have enough to finish the next two periods, but somehow we found some energy and we just kept going.”
And Kennedy led the charge when it came to tearing down the Terriers. Just 1:11 in, the sophomore, left wide open in the right corner, took advantage of a defensive miscue and threw a pass across the zone to linemate Tim Crowder, who slammed home the backdoor shot to take a lead the Spartans would never relinquish.
And while MSU defensemen tied up sticks, blocked shots and swept pucks in front of the net away (keeping Lerg’s generous rebounds off Terrier sticks), Curry wasn’t afforded the same luxury.
“I thought the puck was bouncing off of Lerg a few times early and a few times in the second period, and we didn’t get the rebounds,” Parker said. “They did a good job clearing out, but we made some plays and we had some opportunities. The thing that killed us was we didn’t finish ours and we gave them theirs.”
With 14:38 remaining in the second, MSU’s Jay Sprague finished off an Ethan Graham rebound to drive the score to 3-1. The Spartans struck again at the 17:19 mark, this time off a Daniel Vukovic one-timer that beat Curry stickside.
All the while, Morrow’s career was cut short (with 6:18 remaining in the second), the senior sent off with a 5-minute major and game misconduct for Yip’s suspect hit from behind.
“It definitely hurts, losing Morrow. He’s a big body back there,” Sullivan said. “Him and Gryba have been playing so well together. But just having Morrow back there making those big stops, just having the big body back there and being a leader – it definitely hurt having him go off.”
“The bad part about Morrow getting kicked out of the last game of his senior year [was] he wasn’t the one who hit him,” Parker said. “They got the wrong guy. It was a boarding call, he hit him shoulder-to-shoulder, it was Yip that hit him, it was not a hit from behind.”
Nonetheless, the Spartans were up, 4-1, and the Terriers had just 20 minutes left. The tide had turned, and BU wasn’t doing much to stop it.
“It wasn’t as if they were buzzing the heck out of us,” Parker said. “It was a pass through the crease, goal. A pass from behind the net to a guy who was uncovered, goal. A shot from the point and a guy that’s uncovered walks in and picks up the rebound and scores – those were the three goals in the second period.
“I thought that this game would be won or lost in Grade-A and it was,” he said. “It was won by Michigan State. They protected Grade-A much better than we did, they battled down in front of our net, got the puck to the net and got rebounds on top of John. We didn’t do any of those things.”
The Terriers fell even further in their final period of the 2006-07 season. They reverted back to reacting instead of trying to create, but what the contest truly came down to was BU’s ever-present inability to generate offense.
“I thought Jack said it well the other day,” said MSU coach Rick Comley. “Somebody characterized them as a defensive team and he said, ‘Only because we don’t score.’ We struggled to score with [our] team, but we have people who can score. Tonight, we scored, got the second goal, got the lead, got confident and then got better as the night went on.”
And with 11:56 to play, the Spartans put the final period on BU’s season. Off a feed from defenseman Tyler Howells, Crowder took the puck in alone on Curry, ripping a shot topshelf to complete the 5-1 win.
“I think BU came in – you got your goalie, who’s a Hobey Baker finalist, outstanding goalie – and all of a sudden, the puck’s going in on him,” Comley said. “I think the rest of the team, in that situation, is starting to go, ‘Uh-oh.’ Where our guy is, the puck’s not going in, so that’s how critical that position is.”
Less than five minutes later, BU rookie Luke Popko joined Morrow in the locker room after a spearing call earned him a five-minute major and game misconduct of his own.
“We got penalties in the third period that keep us from getting back in the game,” Parker said. “By that time we were a bit legless, took some stupid penalties and we had to kill too many. We had 42 minutes in penalties – 17 in the second and 17 in the third – it’s hard to get goals when you’re doing that.
“So all in all, it was a very frustrating game for me,” he continued. “It was unbelievable to see us implode – usually when we’re ready to play, we play pretty well, and we were ready to play. I don’t know if it was the first goal or second goal that we imploded on, but after those two, we just watched.”
So, with anything the Terriers had left, they skated the final seven minutes of their season. And with 54 seconds on the clock – and on their BU careers – the seniors, minus Morrow, were given their due after a long and trying season.
“It’s something we’ve been dealing with all year long, especially of late,” Sullivan said. “We’re inconsistent from shift to shift. It happened last Friday, we gave away a couple periods. Everybody was ready in practice this week, we came out in the first period and we played really well, real solid, the way we needed to play. Then, inconsistency. They got a lucky goal off that bounce, but then it just seems like once they got the other goals we were demoralized.”
When the final whistle sounded, the teams respectfully shook hands and went their separate ways – one season over, one still very much alive.
Michigan State battles on after defeating the nation’s top team in No. 1 University of Notre Dame on Saturday night, 2-1, to earn a spot in the Frozen Four, where they will meet the University of Maine on April 5 in St. Louis.
For the Terriers, it’s time to return home, to rest and reflect on a season unlike any other in recent memory. BU could bend no more, it had finally broken.
“The first period had a really good feeling,” Curry said. “They got that bounce, but I still felt that we had confidence in the locker room. But you can’t blame everything on offense, you gotta blame it on everything. From me on up, we just couldn’t get it done.”
“I’ll never forget any of these guys,” Sullivan said. “I’m privileged that I got to put on the Scarlet and White, it’s been a dream of mine. I met some unbelievable people here, and it’s been the best four years of my life.”