LIPKA: Where have things gone wrong?

CHICAGO — The Beanpot began last night.

This obviously isn’t much of a scoop on Commonwealth Avenue, but here, I’m pretty sure everyone who noticed — or even knew what the Beanpot was — packed into the alumni event at a bar at in the Wicker Park neighborhood (the site of John Cusack’s record store in High Fidelity).

I’m writing this just before heading down there, so if you’re interested in whether BU lost in the first round for the first time since what seems like the second Roosevelt Administration, check the pages surrounding this one. I wouldn’t be much of an analyst at this point anyway, considering I’ve watched two periods of Boston University hockey all season.

Hockey — never mind BU hockey — isn’t so big out here. The Blackhawks have their diehards, but they struggle with attendance, and there aren’t any Division I college teams closer than Madison, Wis., or South Bend, Ind.

So when I moved here last fall, not long after spending three of my college years following the Terriers basically wherever they went (I missed one Thanksgiving trip to Colorado), it took a little getting used to not seeing the Scarlet and White play. At all.

Instead, I’ve followed them through a weekly Internet check, which as you can imagine has produced a surprising amount of unwelcome angst.

Sure, the Terriers were bad my sophomore year (2003-04, when they finished 12-17-9), but they were bad because they couldn’t score goals. That was familiar to us, considering Parker’s forwards hadn’t really struck fear into the hearts of anyone since Chris Drury graduated.

But shoddy defense and goaltending? A loss to Robert Morris? A cozy spot in the Hockey East standings beneath both Northeastern and UMass-Lowell?

I know things have been a bit better recently, and I know they’re young. But unless they pulled off the upset last night, they haven’t won two in a row since November, and barring a stunning run through the Hockey East Tournament, this team will miss the NCAA Tournament for the fourth time in 10 seasons.

That’s a stunning frequency for a team that went to nine straight national tournaments in the 1990s, when fewer teams were allowed in.

Unless they pull off the most improbable of winning streaks, the tearful guarantee Pete MacArthur offered me on a Worcester sidewalk after BU was manhandled by North Dakota in the first round of NCAAs during Pete’s freshman year will also go unfulfilled.

MacArthur told me the team would win a national championship before he graduated, and to be honest, I believed him. It made sense, given that they graduated just three seniors, and were looking forward to two more years of John Curry and endless crops of Agganis Arena-influenced blue-chip recruits.

They had their one great chance, when the team ripped off a 19-1-2 run in the second half of the 2005-06 season, reaching a No. 1 national ranking and coming within a game of the Frozen Four. But that, too, fizzled, in an ugly 5-0 loss to Boston College.

Where did things go wrong?

Maybe I’m overreacting, and this is just a learning year for youngsters like Nick Bonino and Kevin Shattenkirk. Maybe Brett Bennett will find his game next season and backbone the Terriers’ return to prominence. Maybe this group really is the one that brings BU back to the Frozen Four — and beyond.

But that sounds oddly familiar to what we were saying four years ago, when the team couldn’t score. A group of 11 mostly-heralded freshmen arrived on campus the next fall, headlined by Chris Bourque. Nine made it to their senior years, but at the most two — MacArthur and Boomer Ewing — can be said to have produced what was expected of them.

Why? Is it something about the type of players the coaches are recruiting? Is there something about the attention players receive at BU that makes them complacent?

Is it — dare I say — the coaching?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge Jack Parker fan, and I have no doubt that he knows hundreds of times more about hockey than I will ever know in my life about any single thing.

But I also have no doubt that, if asked to assess his program’s relative lack of success in the last 10 years, he’d reserve plenty of the blame for himself.

The first time I saw BU play this season was two weekends ago, when the NESN feed of the second New Hampshire game somehow found its way into the satellite dish at my office. I turned on the game just in time to see BU’s valiant second-period comeback and Joe Pereira’s pretty diving goal.

But the third period was torture. The Terriers put just two shots on goal, UNH easily put the game away and Agganis was dead. I returned to my work with a helpless, sinking feeling.

Somehow, this all hurts more when you’re 1,000 miles away.

Mike Lipka, a 2006 graduate of the College of Communication, is a former editor and hockey beat writer for The Daily Free Press.