And I thought the column four weeks ago was tough to write.
When the Boston University hockey team lost to Boston College in the Beanpot Championship game four weeks ago from yesterday, BU players and their hardcore student fan base didn’t really know how to react.
No current BU player had ever experienced defeat the first or second Monday in February. And BU students were, for the first time, left with the burden of answering the chant, “Where’s your Beanpot?”
Yep, waking up the next morning of February 13 and having to defend your college team to your friends from other colleges was one of the worst feelings ever. Despite the loss, I still defended the Terriers to everyone I knew. We all knew that BU’s run in the Beanpot wouldn’t go on forever. We just didn’t know how hard it would be to see the streak come to an end.
To use the thoughts of the esteemed Weird Al Yankovic, seeing Boston College hoist the Beanpot was like cleaning the floors of the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue.
Now this.
Sunday’s double-overtime loss to Providence, from a fan’s perspective, felt worse, not to mention the obvious pain the players were feeling from nearly 10 periods of hockey in just more than 50 hours.
It hurt because the only way BU was to get to the NCAA tournament was by winning the Hockey East tournament.
It hurt because for the third time in the last four seasons, BU’s season ended thanks to a postseason, sudden-death overtime loss. I had images of St. Lawrence dancing through my head for the entire overtime Sunday night.
It hurt because a freshman goaltender was carrying this team on his back and it took a redirected shot to beat him, as opposed to the previous handful of Providence’s golden scoring opportunities in overtime that Sean Fields stopped to prolong BU’s season — whether it be for a couple more seconds, minutes or periods.
It hurt because I had never seen a more convincing demonstration of guts from BU’s wounded captain, Carl Corazzini. Despite having very limited use of his right arm and shoulder, Carl was a leader in every sense of the word.
It hurt because hockey season was over. And it hurt because this time, there was no next time.
I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but this hockey season truly could not have been more frustrating, certainly from a fan’s perspective and definitely from a player’s perspective. For the first time in my years at Boston University, the Terriers did not have an established No. 1 goaltender. During the previous three seasons in which I was a student at Boston University, the Terriers had a clear-cut number one goaltender in Rick DiPietro in 1999-2000 and Michel Larocque in 1998-99. In 1997-98, Larocque played well alongside senior and top goaltender Tom Noble. This season, BU found itself marred by goalie inconsistency and never found one guy to make back-to-back, effective starts in one weekend. Not until the last weekend of the season did BU get a reliable goaltending start in back-to-back nights from one guy, and Fields’ performance against Providence has to place him as the current No. 1 goalie heading into next season. The offense struggled for the most part this season. Five goals in three games against UMass-Lowell is tough to swallow, despite Lowell’s turnaround. Losing two of three games to Merrimack is even tougher. They say the magic number in Hockey East to secure a victory is four goals in one game, and BU managed that just 11 times in 37 games this year, compared to scoring four goals or more in 24 of BU’s 42 games in 1999-2000. The offensive woes, along with the inconsistent goaltending, led to just two conference weekends in which the Terriers walked away with a sweep, and too many conference weekends (eight out of 15) in which BU came away with one point or less. The defense was also marred by injuries this season and struggled in the two stints when ice-leader Freddy Meyer was sidelined due to injury. (BU went 1-5-2 in his absence.) An injury to Pat Aufiero last weekend also left the Terriers with just five defensemen Sunday in a game where you can use all of the defensive legs you can get. So when you add it all up, maybe the Terriers didn’t deserve to win this series against Providence and us fans should have just focused on an excellent crop of freshmen coming in next season to go along with the 21 current underclassmen, looking to help the program bounce back to its dominant ways of the last couple of decades. But we’re Terrier fans and that’s not how we operate. We’ll stick by our team through thick and thin, no matter the outcome, no matter if it’s the popular thing to do. We will always bleed scarlet and white.
But like Dennis says, that’s just my opinion — I could be wrong.
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