Back in Worcester, the screams pierced through the bowels of the Hart Center and into a quiet, empty arena on Friday night. The Boston University women’s hockey team celebrated in the locker room below after a shorthanded 2-0 win at Holy Cross. From the press box, a collective roar arrived first, followed by what sounded like a series of… howls?
Well, sure, dogs do that, too.
Eventually, two equipment managers hustled into the locker room, carrying at least a dozen smoothies. When the players trickled out, Alex Law, laughing, informed assistant coach Megan Meyers that “Ani got a blue one.”
She meant senior forward and team jokester Ani Fitzgerald, who, it seemed, was having her normal fun again.
In many ways, so was BU.
Three nights earlier on one of the sport’s biggest stages, these resurgent Terriers, for whom everything has been so different, were silenced by their cross-town rival again. A golden chance to win the program’s first trophy in six seasons came and went, and assistant coach Megan Meyers admitted that when the team got back together on Thursday, they were still somber.
After all, a day before the 4-0 Beanpot final loss, senior forward Chrsitina Vote had said she wanted to win “more than anything.”
BU didn’t, and was then left to pick up the pieces. But one of the beauties of the Beanpot, which head coach Tara Watchorn said she told her team immediately after the loss, is that BU doesn’t have to win it. The Terriers wanted it. Real bad. But a four-team regular season tournament without conference points on the line in the middle of January wasn’t the end of the world.
“We really realized,” captain Tamara Giaquinto said after Saturday’s sweep-clinching 3-0 win over the Crusaders, “there’s more than just that game.”
There was a Hockey East lead to protect, for one thing. At least 12 more hockey games, too. And — probably most importantly — a brand new home waiting for a team that had spent the entire season without one. Solemn on Thursday, the new renovations to Walter Brown Arena — complete with a new locker room and team lounge — were unveiled to BU on Friday. Meyers said the players already had plans to watch the NFL playoffs on Sunday in their new space.
“Oh my gosh,” Giaquinto said, beaming. “You can’t even explain the emotions when we saw everything.”
Eventually, BU boarded a bus and headed out to Worcester. In the lobby at the Hart Center before the game, some players laughed while playing ‘sewer,’ and others threw a football to each other. Giaquinto joked with a teammate on the bench over an hour before puck drop. During the national anthem, the graduate student — who is Canadian — smirked as she sang along.
There was a fair bit of tension among the contingent of BU fans at the Hart Center. Turnovers on the ice, for which there were too many on Friday, raised stress levels among family members in the stands. But down below, BU seemed to be having a blast.
It helped that sophomore forward Alex Law finally scored her first goal of the year — “the bench erupted,” Meyers said — and a period after, freshman forward Lola Reid found the scoresheet for the first time in almost three months. Reid, the October Hockey East Player of the Month who’d disappeared since winning the award, was effectively benched in the Beanpot, then immediately got the monkey off her back.
When she lit the lamp, the bench lost it.
“They said ‘Bedsy is back,’” Meyers recalled. “Like Connor Bedard is back.”
Reid skated back to the bench wearing an enormous smile and was showered with pats on the helmet.
“For Lola, Lawsie, people who haven’t scored recently, everyone’s super excited for them,” Giaquinto said.
It was a weekend defined by boosts like that one; in Saturday’s win at the reopened Walter Brown, junior forward Clara Yuhn — BU’s leading point-scoring returner — also scored her first goal since early November. As for sophomore No. 2 goalie Mari Pietersen, making her second and third starts of the spring semester after an injury-riddled fall? She recorded the first two shutouts of her career, saving all 40 shots she faced over both contests, and was named Saturday’s first star of the game.
“I’m so proud of Mari,” Giaquinto said.
This is who the Terriers have become this season, a group of players assuming the reins and asking each and every one to help steer the ship. Giaquinto is captain, assisted by a fellow fifth-year and two seniors, but the team has made it clear it gets leadership and insight from everyone — including freshmen. BU gets goals from everyone, too; after Law’s tally on Saturday, the Terriers don’t have a single top-12 forward without a goal. BU is third in Hockey East in goals per game without an individual in double-digits.
“It really just brings the group together,” Meyers said of Law and Reid scoring on Friday.
Watchorn said a couple weeks ago the team had started asking, impatiently, when it would be moving into Walter Brown, and Giaquinto said Saturday “we’ve been waiting a long time.” Both Meyers and Watchorn were asked for their favorite aspect of the new changes, and had almost the same response.
“That they have a space to just be,” Watchorn said. “You think about the culture they’ve built thus far without having that, it’s pretty special to think they just have a place they can hang out.”
BU’s culture has been most apparent after losses, and Northeastern on Tuesday was easily the lowest point of an otherwise dream season. A team that was suddenly so used to winning had lost three of four. BU, which only has two Beanpots in the 46-year history of the tournament, has lost plenty of games like Tuesday’s, and Watchorn has been around for many of them.
But there is just something about these Terriers.
“Just my experiences from player to assistant coach to now head coach,” Watchorn said, “that might be one of the best responses I’ve ever seen after a Beanpot.”
BU, which briefly succumbed its near season-long conference lead in a pre-Beanpot loss to New Hampshire, got right back to dominating lowly Hockey East opponents and, accordingly, right back to the top of the league. The Terriers are tied with first-place UConn and three points clear of second-place Boston College, with a game in hand over each.
In other words, BU is in pole position for its first Hockey East title in 12 years.
After the final horn sounded on Saturday, the lights in the new Walter Brown dimmed, then glowed red, igniting the entire building. Four spotlights under the arena’s new video board lit up the BU logo on the ice as the players lined up for handshakes. After acknowledging a crowd of over 1,400, Law and Fitzgerald skated back to the locker room ahead of everyone else.
There was a clear pep in their step, almost as if they were prancing back into their new home.
It had been a tough week, but there was still a lot for BU to be happy about.
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