The Boston University women’s hockey team’s frustration was evident by the third period of the Hockey East semifinal game against Northeastern University on Saturday. Sticks were slammed on the ice, arms were raised skyward in disbelief and line after line left the ice stymied, unable to beat Northeastern junior goalie Florence Schelling when it mattered most.
Schelling set a Hockey East playoff record for saves in a game, with 44 (which was broken in the following game by Providence College’s Genevieve Lacasse, with 46 in regulation and 58 after nine minutes of overtime) in the Huskies’ 4-2 win over BU. Junior forward Jenn Wakefield was the only player to beat her, although four other Terriers put at least five shots on her.
The tone for the game was set after just 25 seconds, when freshman forward Marie-Philip Poulin, in her first game back from a fractured hand, tore into the Northeastern zone and flipped an uncontested shot just wide of the net. Junior forward Jenelle Kohanchuk followed seconds later with a chance from the top of the crease, but Schelling knocked the puck away, and a relentless first shift yielded nothing on the scoreboard.
In the explosive first period that followed, the Terriers outshot the Huskies 25-9 and opened the game with 14 unanswered shots. Wakefield finally put BU on the board late in the period, shooting from near the boards to Schelling’s right and just catching the inside of the far post to knock the puck into the net. BU had 18 grade-A scoring chances in the first period – almost half of the 40 shots they attempted in the frame – but Schelling turned away every opportunity but Wakefield’s.
“For me those are the games that I love, because it keeps me in the game throughout the whole period,” Schelling said of the early onslaught. “There’s literally no minute that I’m just standing around thinking about something else. It’s just good and I was happy that I was able to keep the team in that game with a couple key saves.”
At the other end of the ice, BU freshman goalie Kerrin Sperry faced 25 shots and stopped 21. After only allowing more than three goals twice between Nov. 21 and Feb. 8, she has allowed three or more in four of her last six starts. But Northeastern’s first goal, like most of the Huskies’ best scoring chances, came on an odd-man rush where Sperry was left essentially defenseless – junior defenseman Tara Watchorn dove back to stop a possible shot from Husky forward Casey Pickett, but Pickett maneuvered around her and set up forward Alyssa Wohlfeiler on the opposite side for the goal.
After Northeastern took a 2-1 lead on a goal off a set face-off play in the second, Sperry made a diving stop and cleared away the rebound on a three-on-one rush, saving the Terriers from falling into a 3-1 hole. The save looked like a game-changer when, shortly afterward, graduate student defenseman Catherine Ward set Wakefield up for her second goal of the game, threading a pass from the point to Wakefield on the goal line to tie the score just a few minutes before the end of the period.
But when the Huskies took their second lead just 1:13 into the third period, all they needed was for Schelling to be perfect for the rest of the game. And despite 15 BU shots, an early power-play chance and increasingly desperate plays that saw Ward and Watchorn rush the puck up the ice themselves like forwards, that’s exactly what they got.
The lack of scoring in the third certainly wasn’t for lack of trying on the Terriers’ part, as they controlled the puck for most of the period in Northeastern’s zone and fired another 10 grade-A shots on Schelling. But as the urgency increased for BU, Schelling, a longtime member of the Swiss national team who is no stranger to high-pressure games, stayed cool and propelled her team, the fifth seed in the tournament, into the championship game against Boston College.
“We’ve known the whole season, and since she got to school, that she’s one of the top goalies in the world,” Wohlfeiler said. “When we see her play like that we know it’s going to be a great game, and we’re going to be in it the whole game.”
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