Welcome, class of 2014. Hopefully you’ve had time to get settled into your slightly-too-small beds and learn all your roommate’s creepy habits. I’d like to ask you to take a break from bulldozing those dining hall cheeseburgers to let me talk to you about hockey. Now, before you say you’ve heard this before, crumple up this newspaper and use it to sop up that burger grease, hear me out.
I know you’ve been told that hockey is king here. You may know about the 29 Beanpot championships and five national titles, you may even have practiced the “rough “em up” chant already. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Understand where I’m coming from – the chants, the rivalry and the banners are much of what makes BU hockey the experience that it is. Without these traditions, college hockey and sports in general would be a boring, trivial exercise that no one would really pay attention to. But rivalries, history, wins and titles are elements of sports that any fan of any game can understand. Whether you are used to watching high-school football in Dallas, water polo in Los Angeles or cricket in London, you probably understand how passion, history and team pride all contribute to make games better.
But because you and your peers come from places where hockey is either non-existent or an afterthought to the “real” professional sports, I’m guessing a lot of you aren’t totally sold on the game itself. I hope that after your time here you’ll change your mind because without first appreciating the sport of hockey, you won’t get as much out of the BU fan experience as you could.
For football fans, coming to BU and not having a team to root for can be a tough adjustment. But making the transition from football to hockey isn’t as hard as you might think. The most obvious similarity between the two sports is, of course, the physical and occasionally brutal nature of both games. Seeing a safety come across the middle to torpedo himself into a receiver or watching Eric Gryba clobber an unsuspecting wing who happened to turn his head at the wrong second definitely gives any fan a shot of adrenaline. Maybe that reaction is a little primitive – and probably only slightly better than hoping for a NASCAR crash or rooting for the bull to catch the matador – but it’s exciting nonetheless.
Hockey players also have a reputation for toughness that surpasses even their football counterparts. Football players take a beating on every play, whereas in hockey hitting is not always part of the central action, but hockey players get clobbered into the boards, spit out a few broken teeth and keep skating like nothing happened.
This attitude should not always be celebrated. Recent studies have shown that playing with concussions and head injuries can lead to serious health complications later in life, but it is ingrained into hockey players. They will not let a cut, scrape or bruise keep them out of the game. Defensemen have to be willing to lie down in front of a slap shot to defend their net and take action if they need to defend a teammate. In football, that would warrant a yellow flag for unnecessary roughness. In hockey, it’s just part of the game.
If you’re a fan of less barbaric sports like basketball or soccer, you will still have no problem falling in love with hockey. Hockey moves at a much faster pace than soccer: hockey players can only go one to two minutes without a break while soccer players can sometimes play 90 minutes or longer. There are also relatively few stoppages throughout a hockey game. Twenty-minute periods generally only take about a half hour to play, which will be a relief to basketball fans who want to assault their televisions during the agonizing time out, commercial, free-throw, timeout and commercial sequences at the end of games.
If you’ve ever watched a midfielder put a perfect through ball into the box or a point guard deliver a no-look pass on a fast break, you know the importance of communication and working as a unit in sports. It’s no different in hockey. On a power play, every player must know exactly where his four teammates are on the ice and each player must execute their role to score a goal.
Whether BU is trying to score on the man advantage or kill a power play, you can’t find two minutes of more exciting game play in another sport. When the goalie leaves his net at the end of a game, that energy goes to an even more unparalleled level – watch the last minute of the 2009 NCAA national championship game if you don’t believe me. Those last frantic tries to tie the game with an empty net threatening on the other side of the ice are like watching a potential buzzer-beater leave a player’s hand and travel toward the basket – if that moment was stretched out for one to two minutes.
Please, class of 2014, scream your “olés” during the penalty kill at the top of your lungs, crowd-surf on the T after the Beanpot and harass some Boston College Superfans (good-naturedly, of course). But after your four years here, don’t just leave with memories of BU hockey, leave with an appreciation for the sport itself.