It’s November of my senior year, so you will have to excuse my feelings of nostalgia. This past weekend I registered for classes for the last time. I am starting to discover that there is life after college and that I need to find a place to live, a way to eat and how to get by without an Ethernet connection. It is time for panic, but also a time to look back at all the fun I’ve had in my three previous years at Boston University.
While there are many things I can look at to remember my time here, perhaps the single thing I will take most from my college experience is college hockey. I remember the first time I got up at 7:30 to stand in the biting cold outside Case and wait for tickets. There is little that compares to the rush I feel as 6:30 p.m. approaches on game day and I make my way out to the T for the six-block ride.
While many people rest up before their long night out of partying, my Friday and Saturday nights have largely been comprised of drinking beer, eating bratwurst and putting on my jersey. When I plan ahead to visit a friend at a neighboring college, the first thing I do is to take out my wallet-sized schedule and see where the Terriers will be. I have come home early from Christmas break just to see the classic match-up between some dogs and some birds, separated by just a couple miles of train tracks.
I have driven to Maine with friends and tailgated in 20 degree weather. When I am sitting at home in August thinking about all the great times that lie ahead in the school year, the first thing that pops into my mind is the ice of Walter Brown Arena and Sasquatch running down the stairs. Some people get excited by great art, a beautiful song or a night at a theater. There is nothing that gets me more excited than going to a sporting event.
Unfortunately, I will also think back at my time of watching hockey as a time filled with negative, uninteresting and unimaginative cheers. We are a school that offers many different talents and one of the most diverse populations in the whole country, but all we can come up with at a hockey game is ‘BC Sucks!’ We have no football team and we complain that we don’t have any school unity. Hockey games are the best place on campus for people to come together and cheer for one common goal, yet we can think of nothing more clever than ‘Go BU’ or ‘Let’s go Terriers.’
We have spirit, yes we do, but it isn’t the right kind of spirit. We are the type of fans at a professional hockey game, not a college one. We have no traditions other than standing up and down to the tune of an old Budweiser commercial (which is, by the way, our most inventive cheer). Some teams throw things on the ice. I propose that after the first BU goal of every game, an enthusiastic fan from section eight throws a can of Boston Baked Beans on the ice to symbolize our dominance of hockey’s most coveted price, the Beanpot.
Walter Brown is a wonderful arena and gets louder than any other in college hockey. Let’s use it to our advantage. You want to heckle one of the opposing players? Do your homework. We have the Cameron Indoor Stadium of hockey, yet our cheers sound more like the negative, bitter heckles that emanate from the bleachers of Fenway Park. At a school as big of ours, with all our athletic attention focused on one sport in a venue as small as Walter Brown, we should be as well known as those crazy fans at Duke. I’ll never forget hearing ‘who’s your daddy, Battier?’ from the fans from Durham or seeing them wave mug shots of a player from North Carolina who had recently been arrested for drinking. Our chants are at best embarrassing.
We should have a Terrier that comes to games. I don’t mean the big Rhett that skates on the ice, although I don’t object to him. I mean a real, live Boston Terrier. Yale has handsome Dan, why can’t we have a Rhett on four legs?
Many of the cheers bring us down. ‘Ole, ole, ole’ is a soccer chant, and it doesn’t belong in a hockey arena; especially not during every penalty kill. After four years of attending games, I have fallen more and more in love with the game of college hockey and become closer to my soon-to-be alma mater because of it, but it could be much better. We have enough devoted fans and the knowledge of hockey to be something really special. Hockey is my favorite memory from my time at Boston University, but it is also a prime example of how much the school needs to grow.
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