“You are looking at this year’s national champions!”
It is a simple sentence. It is a sentence every sports fan wants to hear about his or her favorite team at least once in his or her lifetime. For fans of the Quinnipiac University Bobcats, the men’s hockey team almost made their dreams a reality.
The Bobcats won 30 games last season — the most in program history — but there is still the empty feeling from that elusive 31st victory. Coming so close to a championship makes it hard for fans to decide whether the season was a success or failure.
The easy opinion is that every season that doesn’t end with a championship is a failure.
However, despite ending the season without a championship, Quinnipiac and its fans should be satisfied, even thrilled, with the past season.
Quinnipiac’s season is very similar to the 2006 New York Mets season. Both were teams that seemed to come out of nowhere to dominate the competition, only to fall just short of the ultimate goal. As a Mets fan, that 2006 team and season are special to me without the National League title or World Series championship.
Nothing will ever take away the exhilaration brought by the 2006 Mets. Their domination of the NL East made the last portion of the regular season all but irrelevant.
Quinnipiac dominated the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference, seemingly turning the ECAC Tournament into exhibition games.
So why does one game seem to define their season? The 4-0 loss to Yale was a blowout, and the season seemed to collapse on the Bobcats faster than any of Matthew Peca’s slap shots.
Carlos Beltran’s knees shouldn’t have buckled at a curveball from some rookie. That Adam Wainwright pitch was my first memory of the 2006 Mets for too long. It took until 2012 for me to realize fully that the 2006 Mets were amazing, and I should not judge them by what they failed to accomplish.
The sting of Quinnipiac’s season is not going to leave its fans anytime soon. It shouldn’t have lost to a team in the conference it dominated all season long.
It is perhaps even harder to appreciate the ever-so-close college sports seasons because the majority only remembers the big winners. Quinnipiac just will not be one of the teams in the NCAA highlights. Those are dominated by football, basketball and baseball. If hockey gets any recognition, it’s only for the champions.
It is a fact of life that college sports, particularly college hockey, do not get the same coverage as professional sports. The highlight reels and annual recaps for professional sports are longer than those for college sports and thus have the opportunity to include more top moments from the teams that did not win it all.
College sports highlights focus on the winners, the championship teams and the MVPs. This coverage leaves the fans of teams that fell just short feeling frustrated.
Fans have every right to be frustrated.
What if Carlos Beltran had swung?
What if Eric Hartzell hadn’t saved his worst game for last?
The “what if” questions will always be there. They will always surround the ending of any season that doesn’t involve a trophy and parade. They will be fresh in the mind of fans until the team finds success again.
The end of the 2006 season was a dark cloud over my Mets fandom for too long. It was the closest I ever came to seeing my favorite team win it all. It only started to disappear because I could see the promise of the future.
Quinnipiac has a lot to look forward to. It has plenty of promising players coming back next year and its fans should embrace the fact that they’re rooting for a college team. These players are committed to one team and they too felt the sting of just falling short.
So there is a silver lining in all this gloom.
College sports guarantee the return of good players. It should be easier to move past the frustration and look forward to the next season.
College sports fans should realize that the returning players still have the talent to go to the championship, but now they also have the experience to teach the new players how to get there.
It is hard to believe, but teams that don’t win the championship can be just as optimistic as the one that does.
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