Coming into Wednesday night’s game against the No. 8 Boston College women’s hockey team, No. 3 BU women’s hockey coach Brian Durocher knew of at least one challenge that his team would absolutely face. This obstacle, however, was not a player or a facet of BC’s play.
Durocher knew that when playing in Walter Brown Arena, somehow the Eagles have a tendency to succeed.
“I know they’ll be ready to play,” Durocher said of the Eagles on Tuesday. “For whatever reason, they’ve had luck over here and we’ve had luck over at their place. They’re coming to a building where they’ve had success, and we’re going to have to bring our A-game.”
As Durocher learned Wednesday night, however, the Eagles continued to bring their best effort to Walter Brown while the Terriers would falter in BU’s highest scoring loss of the season — a 7–1 route by BC.
This loss followed a trend that the Terriers and Eagles have been in since the 2007–08 season.
“I told the two coaches, maybe we should change the names of the rinks based on the success,” Durocher said. “We’re winning games over there and they’re winning games here.”
Since that 2007–08 season, the Terriers have not won the regular season series against BC at Walter Brown. Instead, BU has found two scenarios: the Terriers either lose the lone home game of the season or they split the two games at Walter Brown. This trend switches off every year as BU goes from playing one game at home to two games at home each season against BC.
The Terriers are 3–6 at Walter Brown during that time period and BC has outscored BU 34–21 in those nine games.
Meanwhile, when BU travels down the Green Line to play in Conte Forum, the Terriers are undefeated, going 7–0–1 against the Eagles. This includes BU’s season-opening 4–2 victory over BC on Oct. 5.
“I would say it clearly can be mental in both ways because we’ve had luck over there and they’ve had luck over here,” Durocher said.
Durocher said the Terriers had finally gotten off of this trend when they defeated BC at home on Jan. 25 of last year. Not only had BU defeated the Eagles 6–0 in that game, but the Terriers had also pushed themselves to the top of Hockey East so far this season.
“We had a game last year in here where we played very well, carried the game and beat them,” Durocher said. “I thought we were in a position again to capitalize tonight and really set ourselves up in Hockey East and separate ourselves from them, but they were there tonight 110 percent and we were 50 percent here.”
The Terriers will not have another opportunity to break this trend until next season when they will likely face the Eagles in two games at Walter Brown. On Saturday, however, the team has the chance to continue its undefeated streak at Conte Forum when it rounds out the regular season series against BC.
While Durocher said a 7–1 loss is a rarity, he still said there are things his team needs to learn before they take on BC at Conte Forum on Saturday.
“My thing is just to basically get a couple lessons learned from this one, but realize 7–1 games are not easy to come by, and they need a little bit of good bounces and a little bit of good fortune,” Durocher said.
“But we gotta take a couple lessons outta here, and whether that’s how we’re going to kill penalties or show them how hard they competed, we’ve got to get a couple points across and make sure we’re the ones that are the aggressors come Saturday.”
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