Terriers’ tumultuous season comes to end

As the lamp lit up behind sophomore netminder Kerrin Sperry’s head, and the clock froze at 10.1 seconds, the Boston University women’s hockey team’s season ended after a dramatic bout.

The members of an exhausted Terrier squad fell to the ice. After losing its initial lead, BU had come back only to fall to Cornell University, 8-7, in the NCAA Regional Quarterfinal during triple overtime.

In the larger framework of the Terriers’ season, this game represented more than a playoff loss. It featured the initial triumphs, the midseason challenges, the resilience and eventually the demise of a team projected to succeed.

Roughly two weeks into the school year, BU was chosen as the preseason favorite in the Hockey East Coaches Poll, receiving six-of-eight first-place votes. After winning the Hockey East regular-season title the year before, and retuning its two top point producers in forwards Jenn Wakefield and Marie-Philip Poulin, BU appeared poised to take the crown once again.

“I think our expectations coming off of last year, returning a real, real good nucleus of players was to try to gain some of the same goals we did last year,” said BU coach Brian Durocher. “Without a doubt that would be the Beanpot, a real good regular season, the Hockey East Championship and getting back to the NCAA Tournament.”

In the first seven games of the season, the Terriers found success, going 5-1-1, and holding their own against hockey powerhouses like the University of North Dakota, Clarkson University and St. Lawrence University.

The Terriers enjoyed early success in the game against Cornell, as well, jumping out to a quick 3-0 lead in the game. But at the end of the first period, Cornell gained momentum, scoring a goal with 45 seconds left in the frame and taking the air out of an otherwise Frozen Four-hungry BU squad.

Likewise, the Terriers deflated at the end of their season-opening seven-game stretch when a series of injuries to key players debilitated a once offensively potent team.

Senior defenseman Tara Watchorn missed the first seven games of the season with lingering concussion symptoms from an injury that occurred during the Canadian national team camp in August. While Watchorn returned to the Terriers during their series against the University of Wisconsin, she was not at her usual form.

At the same time, redshirt freshman Caroline Campbell suffered a setback to her debut as a Terrier with an ankle injury.

While both of these injuries were detrimental to BU’s team, nothing struck the team harder than a hit Poulin took in the left circle by North Dakota’s goal on Oct. 2. The hit left Poulin with a spleen injury and kept the sophomore forward off the ice until January.

Even worse, senior forward Jenelle Kohanchuk, who was expected to fill the void left by Poulin, suffered a concussion that eventually ended her season just a few games after Poulin was scratched from the lineup.

As the Terriers limped along with a weakened roster, the team began to struggle, going 5-8 for the rest of the semester. While BU suffered defeats at the hands of some challenging squads, the most important losses came in Matthews Arena against Northeastern University, which went on to win the regular season conference title.

Like this intermediate part of the season, the second frame of the quarterfinal against Cornell was a challenge for the Terriers. After the Big Red secured momentum at the end of the first period, they went on to have a four-goal second. Cornell then tacked on two more goals at the beginning of the third period to hold a 7-4 lead.

Alas, BU would erase this deficit, tying the game with fewer than two minutes left in the third period, embodying the same resurgent qualities that helped the team come back in the second half of the season.

The rejuvenated Terriers, with Poulin back in the lineup, went 10-4 in the rest of the regular season. For the first time all year, the roster featured almost all of its star power, and it showed as BU defeated Boston College 6-0 and stopped a series sweep by Northeastern by beating it 3-2 at Agganis Arena on Jan. 28.

“Certainly at the end some people started to get healthy, some people started to get their game rhythm, so that matters to the extent of where we were,” Durocher said. “I think the kids handled it for the most part pretty well . . .. I give them pretty good marks for kind of holding the fort and keeping us on track.”

Thanks to the late comeback, BU found itself in extra play. The Terriers made it to the Hockey East Quarterfinals where it defeated New Hampshire 9-1 to continue their season.

Wakefield earned her 200th career point in that game thanks to a hat trick, and BU set a program record for goals in a single postseason game.

The next weekend, BU took on Boston College and tallied five goals en route to its 5-2 win that punched its ticket to the Hockey East Championship, where BU played for the opportunity to move on to the NCAA Tournament.

The chances seemed slim as the game against Providence College progressed. Friar netminder Genevieve Lacasse stopped everything that came near her, as Providence dug its nails into a 1-0 lead. But with 7.3 seconds left in regulation, Wakefield extended BU’s chances with a goal.

After a quite extra period BU entered into double overtime, where after 2:15 Wakefield struck again to push the Terriers into the NCAA Tournament for the third straight season.

“You kind of have a few good bounces and the kids’ mental state of mind was really strong at the end of the year,” Durocher said of his team’s second half of the season. “They felt good about how they were playing. They are getting some bounces and we were healthy, so that snowballed into a nice set of results.”

Nonetheless, BU could not live up to its NCAA Championship appearance from 2011. After making that comeback to tie up Cornell 7-7 in the quarterfinal, the Terriers and the Big Red played what nearly amounted to a second game. After 59 minutes of overtime play, Cornell forward Lauriane Rougeau put an end to BU’s season and the game.

As the Terriers fell to the ice, a season’s worth of accomplishments and records also fell to the wayside, as BU could not make the total comeback from its mid-season blues to the Frozen Four.

“The season probably ended up being decent,” Durocher said. “Not as good as we would have liked it. We would have liked to have taken a few more games during the year but circumstances that were part of it, to have some really high-end players be injured during the course of the year, certainly was the first part of our slight demise.

“But I give the young ladies who rallied a lot of credit. They kept their composure and still ended up with 23 wins, which is a pretty darn good season most of the time.”