In Troy, N.Y. in 2004, the Boston University men’s hockey team was blinding. At Agganis Arena in 2005, it was blindsided. In this year’s annual faceoff with ECAC opponent Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, back at the Houston Field House in Troy, the Terriers are just a little blind.
“I have no idea [what to expect],” said BU coach Jack Parker. “I talked to the coach the other day and I said, ‘You want to trade exhibition films?’ He said, ‘Nah, we got too much worrying about our team.’ So we’re not even gonna get film from them. We’re not gonna send them film of us.”
And while both teams have gone through key changes since they last met Oct. 21, 2005, the Terriers aren’t sure what to expect out of the Engineers and their first-year coach Seth Appert.
“It’s a new coach,” Parker said. “If it was still Dan Fridgen, we’d have a better feel for what they like to do and what they’ve done in the past, but this is a different situation.”
But there are two situations in the recent memory banks of Terrier upperclassmen-the happier of which is the 2004 match-up, when BU dominated RPI on the road, streaking to a 4-1 mid-December win. It’s a victory the team still talks about.
“I heard them talk about the fact that the year before [last] we went up to RPI and we played as good a college hockey game as there was,” Parker said. “We looked like the 1972 Montreal Canadians in the first period. People in the stands were talking about, ‘Wow, look at this team.'”
But the Terriers talk about another game against the Engineers, too. And that game-last year’s match-up-didn’t have as happy an ending. After going up two goals to none, the 2005-06 squad allowed RPI to claw its way back. Two odd-man rushes tied the score at 2-2 before then-senior forward Kevin Croxton netted the eventual game winner with 14 minutes left to play.
“We just let the game absolutely slip away last year,” Parker said. “We didn’t play very well for the last 15 minutes of the game after we dominated and should have been up by a mile. We couldn’t put the puck by the goaltender.
“And then all of a sudden, we gave up a goal,” he continued. “And then we gave up another goal and then all of a sudden it just slipped away from us. And that was an embarrassing loss. Not because RPI’s not a real good team, but it was almost like we had it and we let it slip through our fingers.”
But in Saturday’s game-the season opener for both teams-the Terriers hope to go back to the look, or at least the score, of the 2004 match-up.
“We’ve given them two different looks,” Parker said. “We’d like to be able to put on a little bit better 60-minute show, instead of the 50-minute show we put on last year against them. We want to be a little bit more like we played two years ago up there.”
The 2006-07 Engineers are without last season’s leading scorer in Croxton, as well as defender Alexander Valentin (who notched RPI’s first goal of last year’s game), among others. In all, the Engineers return 18 players.
The Terriers will have a bit of a new look this Saturday as well, and not just different from last season. BU will switch up its lines from last weekend’s exhibition win over the University of New Brunswick. The shuffle includes reuniting sophomore Jason Lawrence with the rest of the White Line, sophomores Brandon Yip and Chris Higgins.
“We’re gonna put Lawrence back on the White Line, the way it was last year,” Parker said. “The three sophomores will play together. The MacArthur line will stay the same.”
That means that senior Eric Thomassian will move to the Orange Line, matching up with junior Brian McGuirk and sophomore John McCarthy. The fourth line will get a facelift as well, with speedster Steve Smolinsky taking the place of rookie Zach Cohen.
“I think [Thomassian] will give those two guys, McCarthy and McGuirk, a little bit more offense and a little bit more presence out there,” Parker said. “We changed the fourth line around a little bit because we wanted to get Smolinsky in the lineup. So he’s gonna play on Saturday with a guy I thought played very very well, [Ryan] Weston. Weston will play the off wing, Smolinsky will play the right wing and our new Zanc [rookie Luke Popko] will play in the middle.”
So while the Terriers may be charging blindly into battle, they will do so revived and refreshed-and refusing to relive last year’s disappointment.
“They’re not gonna be nervous [or thinking] ‘hope we don’t let it slip away like we did last time,'” Parker said. “The factor is it’s our opening game, how are we gonna play?”