BOSTON — With 63 seconds left for her team to revive itself and a faceoff in the offensive zone imminent, Tara Watchorn scurried over to the end of the bench and cried for a captain.
“Maggie!” she screamed at senior assistant Maggie Hanzel, shoving one hand into the palm of the other. Timeout. The Boston University women’s hockey team needed one. Hanzel relayed the signal to the officials, and with five other teammates, skated back to the bench.
Assistant coach Megan Meyers met them and, in a huddle separate from the rest of the team, frantically scribbled on a whiteboard. Feet away, Watchorn drew up another play to a different group, but the situation was crystal clear; whatever Meyers was cooking up — that was it. BU had spent 59 minutes of the Beanpot semifinal banging its head against a Crimson wall and was down to its final chance.
Hanzel, the Welcke sisters, Riley Walsh, assistant captain Julia Shaunessy and Sydney Healey nodded in front of Meyers. BU has needed goals at plenty of times this season — and for the most part, has gotten them — but then there was Tuesday night at Matthews Arena, when the Terriers were one shift away from squandering a golden chance to win the program’s first Beanpot in six seasons, against a 2-12-2 opponent.
Still: “I had no doubt,” the junior forward Healey later told a crowd of reporters.
It’s hard to believe she really felt that way, but then again, BU has done enough of this by now that perhaps she truly did. Watchorn, in her second season and now the architect of the program’s stunning resurgence, often speaks to her team about never getting “too high or too low,” during games or between them.
“We think that’s brought us a lot of success,” Shaunessy said after practice on Monday.
At multiple points, this dream season could’ve fallen off the rails, but there BU is, every time, standing in the heat and showing you they don’t care. The last time the No. 14 Terriers were at Matthews, with just one win against lowly Merrimack to their name, Watchorn went full scorched-earth on their preparation after a loss to Northeastern. Less than 24 hours later, BU defeated the rival Huskies, 4-0. The last time the Terriers faced a Beanpot team, rival Boston College ripped their hearts out in overtime in front of BU’s biggest home crowd ever. BU responded by suffocating the Eagles on the road the next day. When the Terriers lost 8-1 in their Agganis Arena finale, BU called it a “cool problem to have.”
Now, here was Healey, staring at an unimaginable loss and skating out stone-faced.
“No doubt that we were going to score that goal,” she reiterated.
So she scored it. Crimson coach Laura Bellamy was actually pleased with her team’s defense on the play, a unit that had stood tall despite nearly the entire game being played in front of its goal. But Healey still scored, on what Bellamy called “an unbelievable shot.”
“Great play by us,” she concluded. “Better play by them.”
Watchorn didn’t react — she doesn’t normally when her team lights the lamp — but said postgame she thought to herself “it was about time.” Her players still on the bench almost burst over the walls waiting for Healey and the rest to skate by for a fist bump, and after the team’s leading scorer returned when regulation was over, BU showered her with pats on the helmet. Watchorn, though, quickly summoned the group’s attention. A 3-on-3 overtime session, one of the most unpredictable situations in all of sports, loomed. The Terriers couldn’t get too high.
Three days earlier, at Gutterson Fieldhouse in Burlington, Vt., BU had dropped its first game against a bottom-six Hockey East opponent of the season, largely because — according to Watchorn — the Terriers had gotten too high and low for the first time in forever. Vermont’s fast, free hockey had flummoxed BU, and a team that stresses sticking to its own game plan while not over-scouting the opponent began to overthink and lost because of it. Watchorn, certainly capable of sunshine and roses in media availability after losses, was as blunt as she’d been in months.
It was, of course, not the greatest timing to lose such a game, with an enormous matchup against another lowly opponent around the corner. But as Watchorn was speaking to the media, a screech pierced through the lower ring of The Gut. Senior goalie Callie Shanahan had emerged from the bowels of the arena after the loss to greetings from several friends and couldn’t contain her excitement. Meanwhile, in the entrance to the building, the rest of the team spoke with family members as they normally would — several BU players are from Ontario, Canada, and Vermont is the closest road trip for their families.
The Terriers wound up stuck in Vermont that night after planning to bus home, but chose to sacrifice their free Sundays to prioritize sleep and give everyone the recovery they needed. BU didn’t arrive back in Boston until 3 p.m. Sunday.
“Loads of fun!” Watchorn said Monday, beaming — and not sarcastically — when asked about the extra night.
“We try not to sit on it too much,” junior Maeve Kelly added of BU’s process after losing. “Obviously there’s things to improve on after a loss, but there’s things to improve on after a win, even. So we try not to hyper focus on: ‘Oh, it’s a loss,’ we just flip our mindset and get back to the hockey we know we can play.”
There was little time to sit on things after Harvard took a stunning lead a minute into the third period, and some of the body language scenes that were present on the ice during the frustrating loss to Vermont were nowhere to be found during an equally frustrating situation on Tuesday. BU had a 20-plus lead in shots on goal and still trailed. After Harvard’s goal, assistant coach Reagan Rust — the captain of BU’s last Beanpot-winning team — appeared genuinely heartbroken for the rest of the period, but the players on the ice kept pushing.
“They want us to problem-solve within ourselves,” Shaunessy said. “And that’s really helpful, because we definitely lean on each other when times get tough. That’s built our culture up so much this year.”
“Once again, the group took over the environment,” Watchorn added postgame.
She said the coaches provided the players a “couple things to put their best foot forward,” but that mostly, the message was to take things three shifts at a time. “Go out there, try to score, and if we don’t get it, let’s change with possession and just build momentum. And they did it.” The players took it from there, and after finally breaking through to send it to the extra period, they dominated the 3-on-3 overtime.
“No worries there, either,” Healey said. “I knew we were winning that game.”
3:43 into overtime, Bochna retrieved a loose puck in the neutral zone, wheeled around to the circle and sent BU to the Garden for the Championship game with a cold-blooded wrister. When she scored, Rust ran over to two equipment managers at the end of the bench and wrapped her arms around both. Watchorn turned to Meyers for a hug. The entire bench leaped over the boards to meet Bochna, a graduate transfer from Providence, who had skated into the corner.
“I was in the huddle, and I just kept yelling: ‘I love you guys, I love you guys, I love you guys,’” Bochna said. “And everyone just kept yelling it back.”
It was a high, perhaps the highest moment yet in a season that hasn’t made any sense. BU improved to 14-6-1, matching its total wins from a season ago with mostly the same roster. In 11 games this season that were within a goal headed into the third period, BU is now 8-2-1. Almost none of it’s been straightforward, but BU women’s hockey keeps rolling.
In the locker room afterwards, Watchorn jokingly lamented to her players: “You couldn’t make it easy, could ya?”
“Noooo,” they responded.
More reading on BU women’s hockey:
- Late heroics power BU to overtime win over Harvard in Beanpot semifinal
- At Vermont, BU finally falters as long forgotten problem returns
- BU defeats Vermont in gritty, physical game
- What rebound win over Maine said about BU
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