STORRS, Conn. — This started sometime in September. The Boston University women’s hockey team, with a second-year head coach, a largely unchanged roster and no external expectations, hit the ice for its first official practice ahead of the 2024-25 season. Only three players had ever won a postseason game. All did it somewhere else.
Six months later, they would be exploding off the bench at Toscano Family Ice Forum, hurling their sticks and gloves in the air as they skated straight for junior Sydney Healey. The goal horn would blare. Family and friends would erupt into sheer pandemonium in the stands. Goaltenders coach Bret Gilmour, who works from the press box, would immediately run around the concourse to a flight of stairs for ice-level access. Northeastern, which the Terriers hadn’t beaten in 11 tries when they arrived for the first practice, would watch along, frozen.
Of course, BU didn’t know any of that then. They were a program coming off three consecutive losing seasons, picked sixth in their conference’s preseason poll and presumably aiming to take another small step in a new era. That’s what these Terriers were supposed to be.
But immediately, players noticed something different. BU was faster and more skilled, as if they’d all taken it upon themselves to improve in the offseason after a first-round crashout the March prior. That was the first thing. Of greater consequence? The Terriers were invested and bought in. And most pressing of all — they believed.
Assistant captain Maggie Hanzel went home after that first practice and thought to herself.
Wow, she recalled realizing, this is an intense team.
She probably wouldn’t have foreseen a group of stadium staffers emerging from the tunnel behind BU’s bench, rolling a black carpet onto the ice then carrying out a covered table on Saturday afternoon, March 8. Or that the Bertagna Trophy, awarded to the conference’s top dog and the Terriers’ ticket to their first NCAA tournament in a decade, would soon follow.
She likely wouldn’t have envisioned graduate captain Tamara Giaquinto and assistant captain Callie Shanahan turning to each other and just screaming, after the public address announcer deemed BU as Hockey East’s 2025 champion.
But throughout this week leading up to the conference championship game, the Terriers kept getting asked to imagine what they would’ve said if someone had told them, back in September, that all of this would indeed happen.
And none of them — not Hanzel, not assistant captain Julia Shaunessy, not head coach Tara Watchorn — said they wouldn’t have believed it.
“This group was really special,” Hanzel said on Friday morning. “And everyone kind of saw it right away.”
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The first weekend series of BU’s Hockey East regular season schedule was against Northeastern. It was early October. BU’s fifth-year graduate students — assistant captain Julia Shaunessy one of them — hadn’t beaten the Huskies since their freshman season. Hanzel and everyone else hadn’t beaten them ever.
The Terriers lost the Friday opener at NU’s Matthew Arena, 4-0. The losing streak extended to 12 games.
“We got into the season being like, ‘this is going to be such a different team,’” Shaunessy said. “And then that hits, and you’re like, ‘Wow. Okay.’”
She admitted the balloon could’ve popped right then and there. But something else happened. The Terriers decided to be excited about the opportunity Saturday’s series finale at home presented, Shaunessy said. They asked themselves how they could turn things around in less than 24 hours and what they could learn from another loss to a cross-town rival. They got curious, a word Watchorn used ad-nauseam all season.
The next day — a 4-0 BU win over Northeastern.
Both Watchorn and her predecessor, godfather-of-the-program Brian Durocher, later said the victory was the most consequential of the first semester. The Terriers already had the belief and the investment. They didn’t have the proof of concept and the confidence that comes from it — until they so suddenly did. The Huskies weren’t just BU’s kryptonite, they had won six of the previous seven Hockey East titles.
“The way you get confidence is by accomplishing something,” Durocher said in January. “And that accomplishment right out of the gate to beat Northeastern? It changes the whole picture.”
BU went unbeaten over its next eight games, lost an overtime heartbreaker to arch-rival Boston College, then turned around and suffocated the Eagles the next day in what Durocher said was arguably the best game the program had played in five years. The Terriers, out of nowhere, were just good. Durocher, too, noticed that BU was faster. That didn’t necessarily add up to him — given the roster was mostly the same, and the players BU did lose were some of its most talented. But the retired coach with 36 years of experience saw what he saw. Whereas Durocher’s final few teams had lost confidence, Watchorn’s second team — made up of a lot of the same players — was flying around the ice.
The two opponents BU eventually needed to get through to win the Hockey East tournament were Boston College and Northeastern. Shaunessy said the two played similar games, and the most challenging part? The Eagles and Huskies’ speed. BU was never going to have the pure talent and athleticism those two conference powerhouses had. The Terriers identity was still physicality; they still wanted to slow games down and control possession. But as Shaunessy admitted, “Obviously, you can’t just be physical. You have to be fast.”
And BU, ultimately, was fast enough.
“I don’t think this team is as fast as they were last year, if you look person to person,” Durocher said. “They play faster because everyone is thinking quick.”
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The second time BU and Northeastern collided was in mid-January, on one of the biggest stages in the sport. It was the second straight season the Terriers and Huskies met in the Beanpot final at TD Garden; Watchorn’s first team put up a valiant effort before falling to the heavy favorites in overtime. This time around, BU was leading Hockey East and had a win over the Huskies under their belt.
The problem wasn’t that the Terriers weren’t capable. They’d proven they were. What they hadn’t proven, however, was that they could do it all with something on the line. The stage and the moment, Watchorn and Shaunessy later said, got to BU.
“We can all reflect back and say we wanted to be able to respond under pressure and stress a little better,” Watchorn explained.
Three months later, they became the first team ever to go to overtime in each round of the Hockey East tournament, per BU Hockey Stats. Over the quarterfinal, semifinal and championship game, BU played 215 minutes and 54 seconds of hockey. It led for just eight minutes and five seconds. The Terriers fell behind by a goal on six different occasions, went into two third-period intermissions knowing they needed a goal to save their season, then four overtime intermissions knowing their season would end if they conceded.
BU won every time.
Watchorn had said after the Beanpot final that her message to the team was that it was a trophy BU wanted to win, but didn’t need to. She clarified what she meant after the final game of the regular season (when BU choked away its first HE regular-season title in 12 seasons with a loss to UConn), saying she wanted her players to know they should want to win trophies for each other, not to prove to themselves or anyone else they were a good team. Watchorn admitted Shaunessy told her she didn’t fully understand the post-Beanpot comment at first, but said Shaunessy eventually realized its value.
During the six intermissions in the tournament in which BU’s season was on the brink, players said the energy was light-hearted. They made inside jokes and thought back to the intensity of their practices they’d suffered through together all season. They played music in the locker room.
“It wasn’t ever super intense,” Hanzel said of the intermission vibe during the double-overtime semifinal victory over BC.
During the second intermission of the title game, with BU trailing 2-1, players debriefed with each other before the coaches even walked in, as the Terriers always do. Watchorn said she knew BU would be okay as soon as she entered the room, because the things her group was discussing were “tangible and applicable.” The Terriers had made mistakes — allowing a breakaway chance late in the second, a play on which Hanzel had to take a penalty, which led to NU’s go-ahead power-play goal — but they were also playing well; Northeastern didn’t record a single shot on goal for the first 16 minutes of the frame.
“We’ve talked a lot about making them emotionless,” Watchorn said postgame of the team’s tactical discussions. “They aren’t good or bad. They just are.”
She’s spoken all season about emphasizing “curiosity” with her team. She wants the players to find joy — and motivation — in solving problems and figuring out how to move forward and improve as a group. Before some of the biggest weekends of BU’s season, as it pushed for that regular season title, Watchorn said BU was more focused on how it could improve against a specific team it had struggled with in the past, rather than the critical league points on the line.
“Solving problems. It’s been the message,” Watchorn said. “As a young woman and high-performing student athlete, you don’t get to this level if there isn’t some element of perfectionist in your mentality, but that’s just not the reality at the highest level. We’ve been talking about it all season — on a game day, a lot of us think about wanting to have the perfect game, and that just doesn’t exist.”
So with its season once again on the line at the final hurdle on Saturday, BU talked about what tactical adjustments it could make, then “kind of laughed,” as its head coach put it.
Said Watchorn of the message in the locker room: “Well, we’ve been here before! Might as well do it again.”
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Once the pile atop Sydney Healey finally eased, the ESPN cameras cut to the face of the junior who’d just won BU’s sixth Hockey East title and first since 2015. Healey was bawling. She embraced her younger sister, freshman defender Keira Healey, then skated down the ice with the rest of the team to acknowledge BU’s student section, The Dog Pound, and its pep band. She was still crying as the Terriers shook hands with the Huskies.
By the time she made it to the postgame press conference, she couldn’t even remember holding the Bertagna Trophy.
“Started blacking out by the end of that,” she joked as she walked off the podium.
During the trophy presentation, a staffer came up to Watchorn and handed her a conference champions’ hat. The first woman ever to win Hockey East as a player and coach immediately turned to her left and tapped the shoulder of senior No. 3 goalie Emily McDonald, showing off her new gear.
“To win with this team,” Healey said, “it just means so much more.”
Like everyone else that had spoken to the media along BU’s miraculous run through the tournament, she said there was never a doubt in her mind the Terriers would eventually pull through. It didn’t matter that it was the Huskies, who had 12 players on its roster that had already won Hockey East. It didn’t matter that BU only had one, who did it at a different school. It didn’t matter that the Terriers trailed going into the third against a team that had gotten here because it was so dominant in third periods.
“We were coming back from that,” Healey deadpanned.
Flint, Northeastern’s coach, had spoken at his press conference moments earlier, after coaching the Huskies in the title game for the ninth straight season. He was asked what was different about these Terriers, who beat his team three times in a season for the first time in a decade.
“They’re on a mission right now,” he said.
More reading on BU women’s hockey:
- BU wins first Hockey East title since 2015, beating Northeastern 3-2 in overtime
- Inside the thrilling Battle of Comm. Ave that sent BU to the HE Championship Game
- How BU survived a scare in the HE quarterfinals to defeat Vermont in overtime
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