It was a series built up as a showdown between the top two teams in Hockey East.
It was a series built up as a matchup of the No. 2 and No. 6 teams in the nation.
It was a series built up by the excitement of a 1-1 tie at Walter Brown Arena in November.
It turned out, however, to be a series that proved the team atop the league standings deserves to be there, validated any claim they may have to being the best team in America, and suggested that Sean Fields’ glove might have been the only reason the Boston University hockey team got even a single point from the University of New Hampshire this season.
The Wildcats were dominating in their home-and-home sweep of the Terriers this weekend, taking Friday night’s game at the Whittemore Center, 6-1, before squeezing out a come from behind 5-3 win last night at Walter Brown.
BU (14-7-2, 8-5-2 Hockey East) entered the weekend just two points back of New Hampshire (19-4-2, 11-2-2) in Hockey East. But with two losses and the University of Maine’s sweep of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the Terriers slipped into third place, two points behind the Black Bears and six behind the Wildcats.
“There’s no question who the best team in the league is, as far as we’re concerned,” BU coach Jack Parker said yesterday.
New Hampshire established itself early and often Friday night, taking a 2-0 lead less than halfway through the first period and never relenting, sandwiching the Terriers’ lone goal with two three-goal outbursts.
Parker, however, said he thought goalies Sean Fields and Jason Tapp played as well as they could Friday night, despite allowing a season-high five goals, given the “pathetic” support from their teammates.
According to official shot charts, New Hampshire had 63 shot opportunities from below the dots in the faceoff circles over the two games. To the contrary, BU managed only 36 such chances.
“The difference in the ability of both teams — our inability to cover them, while they’re making great plays in our zone, and our inability to make a pass while coming through the ice in their zone — it was much more than a 6-1 game,” Parker said of Friday’s contest. “It could’ve been 12-1.”
Sunday’s game was more even, but New Hampshire came back by scoring three third period goals, extending a streak throughout which they have outscored opponents 30-2 in the third period over their last nine games.
National No. 1 University of Denver split a series with No. 4 University of Minnesota this weekend, opening the possibility that New Hampshire will get at least some consideration as the best team in college hockey, though Wildcat coach Dick Umile wasn’t too interested in the acclaim.
“We just want to stay in first place in Hockey East, and we’ll be happy with that,” he said. “If you start paying attention to [national polls], you’ll be at the bottom real fast.”
The Terriers, however, may be heading in the opposite direction. Aside from beating an injury-devastated Boston College team twice last weekend, BU has now blown two third-period leads and twice lost by at least three goals in its last six games.
And if to be the best, a team must beat the best, the Icedogs’ five league losses certainly indicate they have a lot of ground to make up. Each time they have matched up with Hockey East’s hottest team, they have lost.
BU’s first conference loss was to BC, coming while the Eagles were in the midst of a five-game winning streak. The Terriers next lost to the River Hawks at Tsongas Arena, the sixth of nine straight Lowell wins. Northeastern University’s win over BU earlier this month was the start of a six-game unbeaten streak for the Huskies, while New Hampshire’s sweep this weekend continues a dominant stretch in which it has won 15-of-17.
The Terriers must now look carefully to the future. Their next three league games are against conference doormats Merrimack College and UMass-Amherst, though following the Beanpot tournament BU returns to face the brass of Hockey East, including Lowell, Providence College and Maine.
That tough final stretch could be what determines whether or not the Terriers meet a preseason goal that even recently seemed easily attainable.
“You always look at the Hockey East standings,” Parker said. “Our goal at the beginning of the season was to make the top four. We’re hopefully going to do that.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
