Carey, the only captain, skated around with a child in her arms.
Kelly sat against the walls of Wally B’s home couch.
Healey stood above BU’s central ice logo, staring at everything and nothing with red eyes.
And Yuhn, the most visibly distraught of them all, sat on the Hockey East logo, just inside the blue line. The look on the assistant captain’s face suggested that a woman was far from coming to terms with the fact that she would never enter that attack zone again.
BU gave the mighty Northeast all it had and then some on Saturday afternoon. It played perhaps the best match of the season, against undoubtedly the best opponent in the competition, with undoubtedly the highest stakes. The team could have won this thing on so many different occasions over the course of the 82 minutes, if a shot had been a little higher, if Lisa Jönsson’s reaction had been a little slower. These Terriers know the feeling well. A year ago, they were the team that survived that tightrope, becoming the first-ever Hockey East champions to reach overtime in all three rounds of the conference tournament. In one of those rounds, the semifinal against Boston College, overtime was doubled, just like in Saturday’s quarterfinal. BU then escaped.
Fate, through little fault of the Terriers, was not on their side this time.
“There’s nothing you can say,” head coach Tara Watchorn said, “to take away the sting of this.”
Maybe if BU, which was about to end the regular season, showed up for the postseason and simply rolled along, Saturday’s 2-1 loss to the Huskies would have been easier to swallow. But the Terriers did not play like the team that looked so lost in the last month and a half of the campaign. They played like a team that can hang with and beat anyone, a team that would have been a legitimate Hockey East contender if it had played like that all the time. You don’t take those Huskies, who are having such a dominant season that they probably don’t even need HE’s automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, into two overtimes while accidentally outsmarting them. This was no mirage. This was the image of what BU could have done this season, but wasn’t.
“We are a talented group,” Watchorn stated.
It’s a cruel irony that a team that was so clearly lacking confidence for much of the season showed up Saturday as a monumental underdog and played like it thought it was the favorite. That a team that struggled so much with disciplined decision-making was so cognizant of line changes that it survived an 82-minute match with only five active defenders, only three of whom played the entire time. Or that a team had an edge over the nation’s No. 5 team in shots in six of its last seven regular-season games.
It was everything BU should have been all along, and yet Watchorn felt her group should have changed its tune. They could have executed their defensive game plan more tightly for NU’s waves of talent. If the Terriers stuck with the Huskies and held them to just two goals in a game That long, and there was still room to improve their performance? What does that say about BU and the reasons it failed this season? Was this less a fundamentally flawed selection and more a massive missed opportunity?
Does that help explain the emotion on the faces of BU’s graduating leaders? That it was heartbreak, yes, but also frustration at what these Terriers were this season and regret at what they should have been?
“It was trying to get them to have that cohesive performance,” Watchorn said. “We all learned a lot from this year. I’m proud of fighting until the end. I’m proud that we showed up every day and tried to get better. And I know we’ll carry the lessons of this season with us.”
Watchorn certainly will, and the same goes for the underclassmen who are about to become much more important here. Like freshman Anežka Čabelová, a forward who was forced to play defense in the biggest game of the year, who gave BU solid play on the blue line for a period and a half (“Maybe we unlocked something there,” Watchorn chuckled). Like freshman Lexie Bertelsen, already a total threat to the forward line, and sophomore Kaileigh Quigg, who has the kind of combination of size, strength and speed that produces top players, and sophomore Keira Healey, who will be BU’s most experienced defender next season.
They will all learn the lessons of Watchhorn’s undoubtedly disappointing third season. But the Terriers’ seven seniors, who played such a crucial role in BU’s miraculous return to the top of the conference a year ago, won’t. Not Kelly, who was just starting to resemble the confident, puck-moving defenseman she was as a junior. Not Carey, who Watchorn says has been through so much in her role as the lone captain. Not Yuhn or Luisa and Lilli Welcke, the German twins who just returned from Milan and do just about everything at a high level except put pucks in the back of the net.
And not Sydney Healey, the leading scorer who put BU on her back all season while waiting for everyone else’s play to catch up to hers.
“I told them, ‘We’re not going anywhere,’” Watchorn said of her post-game speech to her team. “And know that this is not the end.”
But for some of them it is. And that is a shame, especially considering how well BU ended up playing on Saturday afternoon.
#finally #proven #season #ended