The Fields less traveled…

Within a 50-foot radius near the east end of Kelley Rink last Saturday, there was only one person who was having fun.

Sean Fields took a few strides out of the crease, aimed his X-ray eyes through the traffic in front of him and calmly stretched out his gigantic glove to nab yet another futile Boston College attempt – the 100th such result of the weekend. There were about 20 seconds left in the stunning 4-2 Boston University win, and if anything was going to console the Superfans just behind Fields, what the senior superman did next was not it.

Fields looked in his glove, and as if he saw a cockroach, he flicked the puck away. He wanted nothing to do with it.

“People say I get flamboyant with my glove, but that’s just me enjoying myself,” Fields said, leaning back on the couch in his apartment, enjoying himself. “If you’re gonna do something, you might as well have fun.”

From the day the 11-year-old defenseman showed up to his game and volunteered to fill in for his team’s ailing netminder, it has just been fun for Fields, now 23, to play what he called a “lonely position.” Simple logic says that Fields was meant to be a goalie all along.

Case in point: The kid does not speak – to anybody – on game days. After his signature hop over the threshold and onto the frozen surface, he breaks into his, low, long strides. Then, unlike virtually every other goalie in the nation, he does not scratch up the freshly Zambonied crease when he arrives there – he simply glides in with a flourish on a perfectly executed 20-foot hockey stop, every time.

During the national anthem, the senior stands on the blue line, rocking from side to side, head tilted back as if he can’t stay awake, but his huge, possessed eyes open wide, piercing through his mask and eventually the ceiling. When his teammates crowd the net for one last pep talk, Fields is directly in the center of it. But he might as well be back home in Edmonton.

“Because he’s a goalie, he’s weird,” said BU coach Jack Parker. “Most goalies I’ve known have been always weird.”

But Fields is not like most goalies. Many loyal members of Terrier Nation know very little or nothing about him. The misconceptions are about as thick as the mysterious air that travels around the 6-foot, 191-pound stopper and his normal brown hair, surprisingly muscular frame and banged-up bare feet underneath all the equipment.

He’s from the homeland of hockey, and pretty far up there, too. Perhaps his seclusion in the northernmost stretches of civilization in Alberta contributes to his laid-back demeanor. Or maybe it’s just the house in which he was raised.

“I guess I’ve harped on him for years and years,” said Sean’s soft-spoken father Bill. “Just make sure you have fun out there. The game is only fun, and that’s been probably my focus to him all these years.”

As for the misconceptions: self-centered, showy and arrogant are words commonly thrown around, especially by fans of opposing teams. The Walter Brown Arena faithful might say introverted or quiet, but they still love him. Really, it just depends on whom you ask.

“He’s never said much to me other than, ‘Yup. Nope. Yup. Nope,'” Parker said. “I know he’s social with his teammates, but around the staff he’s very, very aloof, focused. Almost a stay-away type of guy. For the most part, it’s just, ‘I’ll do my job, let me be.'”

He even ended up at BU quietly, a year earlier than he expected – and practically by accident after No. 1 overall pick Rick DiPietro dashed for the NHL after his freshman year. Brian Durocher, BU’s associate head coach, said Fields only ended up a Terrier because of game tape and word of mouth in the summer of 2000. But what he’s seen led him to describe the goalie as “unflappable.”

Meanwhile, goalie coach Mike Geragosian called him “caring,” his father anointed him a “comedian,” teammate Ryan Whitney dared to say “talkative,” roommate Mark Mullen accused him of being a “creature of habit” – all of this next to Parker’s “weird.” Fields simply calls himself “calm and confident” and “easily satisfied.”

But he’s a lot simpler than all the different angles might indicate, and maybe that’s where all the confusion comes from. Forget the puzzling player who goes to a different world somewhere between his pads during timeouts.

All of it stems from the fun factor, he said. Winning is fun, which makes for the competitive kid who doesn’t care about Beanpot MVPs when BC’s celebrating with the real trophy. Being rattled is no fun, which leads to his calming, ever-focused presence in the BU zone. Friends are fun, as Whitney said plenty has gone on involving Fields’ sense of humor that can’t be printed in a family newspaper. One can only imagine, after the goalie was seen participating in a fake jousting match with Kenny Roche in practice earlier this year.

Avoiding confrontation? Going with the flow? Taking life as it comes? All fun, at least for Fields. In his and Mullen’s common room, there is a large Canadian flag on one wall and the Stars and Stripes on the other, for Mullen’s native land, just “out of fun,” Fields said.

“We both get along pretty well – we’re both pretty quiet,” Mullen said. “Don’t have to be talking all the time.”

The roommates had no problem tearing themselves away from a movie of the Western variety (“There’s not too many movies that I don’t like,” Fields said.) when it was interview time – they both found ways to entertain themselves, easily.

Judging by how his hockey career has gone so far, Fields has a pretty good time in net, too. The kid with the small pads (“He has long arms and a pretty strong reach and a real good build,” Geragosian said.) holds the all-time BU records in wins, saves, minutes and games played. “Athletic” seems to be an understatement to describe the way Fields can quickly shift across the crease, kick his pad, wave his blocker or snap his glove – consistently.

He’s also not afraid to defend his crease – as his 12 penalty minutes this year prove.

“He’s got a pretty good demeanor out there as far as not getting rattled,” Parker said. “Just playing the next shot, and not worrying about the last one.”

“I could probably count the number of really bad games he’s ever had in his life on maybe one hand,” the elder Fields added.

Bill Fields’ glasses might be slightly scarlet-tinted as a proud parent, but his exaggeration is not drastic – which makes the first half of this season even more shocking.

Inside the front cover of BU’s media guide, there’s a full page declaration of Fields as a Hobey Baker and All-American candidate – this was supposed to be the year for Fields and his team. After solid sophomore and junior seasons (a combined 46 wins, save percentage over .905 and GAA under 2.6), he finished his junior campaign carrying the team on his back to within one win of the Frozen Four, winning Beanpot and Hockey East Tournament MVP honors on the way.

This year he seemed primed for a whole season of piggy-back, as the Terriers (12-16-9, 6-13-5 Hockey East) were a defensive bunch in a league of teams with impressive arsenals like Boston College and New Hampshire. But no one doubted he could do it.

“He wanted to play as well as he could for his team because he knew this team wasn’t gonna score a lot of goals,” Parker said. “Maybe there was more pressure on him to be even better than he has been in the past.”

After a collective pressure fell on the shoulders of an offense that couldn’t have scored on a soccer net, it was not sniper Frantisek Skladany nor center Brian McConnell that felt the brunt of the drought most heavily. It was the guy who was never going to score a goal anyway. With the team rarely giving him more than one or two goals of support in a game, Fields fell apart mentally under the pressure.

“All of it contributed,” Fields said. “Me having the feeling, ‘Well, I can’t let any bad goals in.’ So you start thinking, ‘Don’t let this goal in,’ and that’s the last thing that’s running through your mind when the shot’s being taken. Instead of positive thinking, you’re trying to not let something happen instead of making something happen.”

Soon, the one cog Terrier Nation knew it could trust was the one that (gasp) needed major repair. After an inconsistent first few months of the season, things plummeted to unforeseen depths for Fields in January.

Against Northeastern, Fields gave up three softies and was pulled in the second period in favor of backup Stephan Siwiec, who shut the Huskies out for the rest of the game, leading BU to a 4-3 overtime win. The next week against BC, Fields was again tapped on the pads by Siwiec after a similar second-period meltdown at Kelley Rink. Siwiec started the next night, sparking talk of an unthinkable goalie controversy.

“[I was] just frustrated with myself and my play,” Fields said. “But on the bench, I don’t want to let my teammates see that. As much as it hurt me, I cheered them on and tried to keep them in the game and not let them see that I was pouting or anything.”

Always calm, cool and collected on the outside, there is still some mystery between Fields’ slightly oversized ears. That’s why it was clear when the anti-Sean Fields poked his way out the most – it was a week later, when the no-longer-definite starter got another shot against Maine.

“I just told him, ‘Hey Sean, all you gotta do is be Sean,'” Parker said he told Fields before the weekend.

The three shorthanded goals that had already lit the lamp behind him were hardly even his fault, as he was hung out to dry each time – but he certainly wasn’t on his game. It seemed like only anger that smothered the Black Bears’ fourth shorthanded breakaway of the period, and after the puck was cleared, anti-Fields whacked the post with his stick – an uncommon outward display of emotion – and not much fun.

He gave up eight goals that night, but Parker stuck with him the whole time. And the next night against the same Maine team. He shut them out, 1-0, on 27 saves.

“Letting in eight goals is never good for a goalie’s confidence, but coach coming back with me, it did show that he does show confidence in me,” Fields said. “I got a couple saves early, and just my confidence started going after that.

“I was trying to do too much, I was overplaying shots,” he added. “I started thinking and worrying too much instead of just playing. Once that started happening, I didn’t play very well. After that, it turned into a spiraling confidence issue.”

As Durocher pointed out, between the pipes is the last place a player can lose his confidence.

“When you lose your confidence at that position, you can’t make up for it that easily because you can’t go in and check somebody or you can’t go in and drive the net,” Durocher said. “You either have to stop it or you don’t stop it.”

But after shutting out the nation’s second-ranked team, his confidence started spiraling in the other direction. He’s allowed more than three goals just once in BU’s last 16 games – all Fields starts – to bring his numbers back to respectability (2.86 GAA, .900 save percentage). Not to mention another Beanpot MVP award after single-handedly keeping an overmatched BU team in the Beanpot final against then-No. 1 BC.

That night, Fields stopped 50 Eagle offerings in a 2-1 overtime loss – the type of gasp-inducing performance that has become somewhat expected over the last couple of years.

“Obviously, you feel really comfortable playing D in front of him,” Whitney said. “You know if you make a mistake or two he’s gonna always be there to back you up.”

He haunted BC again last weekend in even more profound fashion, stopping 100 of 107 shots in the three-game set, including 28-save and 35-save wins in Games 1 and 3. All the eight-seed over one-seed upset did was extend the Terriers’ season – something that every ‘Dog wanted, but none more than No. 31.

He’ll have another chance to help keep the Icedogs on life support in the Hockey East semifinals at the FleetCenter Friday, appropriately against Maine.

“We feel we can play with any team in the country,” Fields said from his apartment, before BU beat BC, or even made the playoffs. “If we come out to play the way we can, there’s no team that we can’t play with.”

He’s had some pretty good games on Causeway Street – the big games with the big crowds are, of course, more fun. There’s no way to suspect otherwise this time, especially with season’s end looming.

Because beyond the final bitter buzzer hangs a shroud of uncertainty for the undrafted free agent. All his coaches agree that he has the tools to play at least minor league hockey, with realistic hopes for the NHL. But whether that opportunity is given to him, especially with the collective bargaining doubt hanging over American pro hockey, remains unclear. Which means he’ll just have to extend his college career as long as he can.

As for life after hockey?

“That means I have to grow up,” said the economics major, refusing to even consider the question, flicking it away like another cockroach.

He won’t play hockey forever, but he’ll have fun forever. Fields is simply that 11-year-old attitude inside a 23-year-old body with a focused, motivated mind years ahead of that.

He didn’t get to play goalie when he was just a little kid. But he’s just a little kid playing goalie right now.

And that’s something he’ll be this weekend, too.