Cristina Romano
Last season, one of the only times a Boston University women’s hockey player accompanied Tara Watchorn in the postgame press conference after a loss was the regular season finale against UConn. It was a brutal defeat on the surface, one in which BU officially squandered a Hockey East No. 1 seed it had three separate chances to clinch. But the Terriers knew they played well, and then-senior assistant captain Maggie Hanzel came out to set the record straight.
So it was impossible not to see the parallels on Friday night when, after BU’s 5-0 season-opening loss to No. 3 Minnesota, into the press room trotted senior assistant captain Clara Yuhn. She spoke bluntly and with absolute conviction. On multiple occasions, she jumped in to add a thought without being asked.
The prevailing sentiment?
“This score didn’t reflect, in my opinion, the confidence we gained from that,” Yuhn said.
The numbers are the numbers, and they aren’t kind to No. 13 BU: the Terriers were outshot 49-24 and conceded five goals. Without question, BU was outplayed and it deserved the result it got. But the Terriers also served 24 penalty minutes — including two five-minute majors, one of which resulted in the ejection of one of their best players — a number higher than any single game a season ago. Watchorn and Yuhn both acknowledged that BU needed to be more mature and composed, but the former also didn’t hide her irritation at the officiating, especially the ejection handed to senior forward Lilli Welcke in the first period. The shots on goal numbers look gaudy, but the Golden Gophers piled up a ton of them on the skater-advantage (though they did only score once).
“We played physical. And the game should be physical,” Watchorn said. “There was a lot of great contact, and I don’t think it was called great.”
In the moments the Terriers stayed out of the box, they hung around with the No. 3 team in the country, and in the 10 minutes before Welcke was ejected, BU was simply the better team. Before that game misconduct, the Terriers had seven shots on goal to the Gophers’ two.
Said Yuhn when asked how BU handled Minnesota’s speed and physicality: “I thought we handled it great. It showed in the first 10 minutes of the game… [we’re] dominating in their zone, they’re barely in our zone.”
At even strength, BU didn’t play like a team that didn’t belong. The Terriers were fast, bold and fearless. They refused to simply dump and chase the puck, instead trusting their ability to build out of their defensive zone with the puck at their sticks, even against Minnesota’s forecheck. BU didn’t control the neutral zone, but it wasn’t dominated in it, either. In the offensive zone, they played with confidence and, on multiple occasions, used a pretty play to create a good look on net. Before she was kicked out of the game, Welcke very nearly scored a highlight-reel solo goal. And even as the game got away from them in the third period, BU still generated some chances, including senior forward Sydney Healey hitting the crossbar on a wrister from the slot. The pragmatism you’d normally see from a heavy underdog — dumping the puck when hemmed in the defensive zone, settling for tame wristers just to get a shot on goal — wasn’t present at all. You could probably argue BU was so focused on generating a good chance that it wasn’t pragmatic enough.
“We know how much skill we have this year, how much speed we have,” Yuhn said. “It showed in the way we were able to do zone entries. And if we were to dump it, it was very strategic. That’s something we practice every day — everything we do is calculated. And especially against a team like Minnesota, we came prepared.”
“We’re not just throwing pucks away,” Watchorn added. “We focus on supporting [the player with the puck] when we need to, and making them get it off you. And I think we did a really good job.”
The scoreboard won’t show any of that. But the Terriers were far more in the game than they were in a series-opening loss at Minnesota a year ago, even though they only lost the game, 1-0. That’s a significant step forward for the program, especially given how much younger this roster is compared to last year’s.
“We’ve got a lot of speed, but we’re also playing fast together,” Watchorn said. “The way they’re able to play fast with and without the puck and read off each other — it took us months to get to this place last year. And they’re already there, so sky’s the limit.”
BU’s got plenty to clean up. Minnesota scored twice in the third period on routine 2-on-1 chances in transition, and the Terriers can’t afford to leave junior goalie Mari Pietersen out to dry like that. They weren’t able to prevent the Gophers from getting pucks on net, and that led to two more Minnesota goals off grimy rebounds around the crease. And, of course, BU cannot commit so many penalties.
But for a team embarking on a Hockey East title defense after losing a ton of experienced contributors, the Terriers proved a lot on Friday night.
“After the first period — even after Lilli’s penalty — we came into the locker room and we were very fired up for our ability to hang and to be dominant and to create opportunities,” Yuhn said.