BOSTON — They were out there in full uniform, littered across the Walter Brown Arena ice sheet. As if Sydney Healey, Clara Yuhn, Maeve Carey and Maeve Kelly were the remaining debris from this absolute romp of a Hockey East quarterfinal, a game neither team deserved to lose but only one needed to win. And the team that needed to win lost. So there were the four senior members of BU’s leadership group, 30 minutes after their collegiate careers ended with one odd-woman rush, scattered around their home rink, taking it all in one last time.
Carey, the lone captain, skated around with a child in her arms.
Kelly sat against the walls of Wally B’s home bench.
Healey stood over BU’s center-ice logo, staring at everything and nothing with red eyes.
And Yuhn, the most visibly distraught of all, sat on the Hockey East logo just inside the blue line. The look on the assistant captain’s face painted a woman nowhere close to accepting she’ll never enter that offensive zone again.
BU gave mighty Northeastern everything it had and then some on Saturday afternoon. It played arguably its best game of the season, against unquestionably the best league opponent, with undoubtedly the highest stakes. It could’ve won this thing on so many different occasions throughout the 82 minutes, had a shot been elevated just a little more, had Lisa Jönsson’s reaction been just a tad slower. These Terriers know the feeling well. A year ago, they were the team that kept surviving that tightrope, becoming the first Hockey East champion ever to go to overtime in all three rounds of the conference tournament. One of those rounds, the semifinal against Boston College, went to double overtime, as Saturday’s quarterfinal did. BU escaped then.
Fate, through little fault of the Terriers’ own, wasn’t on their side this time.
“There’s nothing you can say,” head coach Tara Watchorn said, “to take away the sting of this.”
Perhaps, if BU, which was reeling to end the regular season, showed up to the postseason and simply rolled over, Saturday’s 2-1 loss to the Huskies would’ve been easier to take. But the Terriers didn’t play like the team that looked so lost in the final month and a half of the campaign. They played like a team that can hang with — and beat — anybody, one that would’ve been a legitimate Hockey East contender had it played like that all the time. You don’t take those Huskies, having such a dominant season that they probably don’t even need HE’s automatic bid to the NCAA tournament, to two overtimes, while outshooting them, by accident. This was no mirage. This was the image of what BU could’ve been this season, but wasn’t.
“We’re a talented group,” Watchorn declared.
It’s a cruel irony, that a team that so clearly lacked confidence for much of the season showed up as a monumental underdog on Saturday and played like it thought it was the favorite. That a team that struggled so much with disciplined decision-making was so in tune with its line changes that it survived an 82-minute game with only five active defenders, only three of which played the whole time. Or that a team outshot in six of its last seven regular-season games paced the No. 5 outfit in the country in shots.
It was everything BU had needed to be all along, and even so, Watchorn felt her group could’ve changed lines better. Could’ve carried out their defensive gameplan for NU’s waves of talent tighter. If the Terriers hung with the Huskies and held them to just two goals in a game that long, and there was still room to elevate their performance? What does that say about BU and the reasons it failed this season? Was this less a fundamentally flawed roster and more a giant missed opportunity?
Does that help explain the emotion on the faces of BU’s graduating leaders? That it was heartbreak, yes, but also frustration over what these Terriers were this season and rue over what they should’ve been?
“It was trying to get them to have that cohesive performance,” said Watchorn. “We all learned a lot from this year. I’m proud of the fight to the very end. I’m proud that we showed up every day and tried to get better. And I know that we’re going to carry the lessons from this season.”
Watchorn sure will, and the same goes for the underclassmen who are about to become a lot more important around here. Like freshman Anežka Čabelová, a forward forced to run as a defender in the biggest game of the year, who gave BU a period and a half of stout play on the blue line (“We might’ve unlocked something there,” Watchorn said over a chuckle). Like freshman Lexie Bertelsen, already a total menace on the forecheck, and sophomore Kaileigh Quigg, who’s got the kind of size-strength-speed combo that produces top players, and sophomore Keira Healey, who will be BU’s most experienced defender next season.
All of them will get to learn the lessons of Watchorn’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 again starting to look like the confident, puck-moving defender she was as a junior. Not Carey, who Watchorn has said went through so much in her role as 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 putting pucks in the back of the net.
And not Sydney Healey, the star leading scorer who put BU on her back all season as she waited for everyone else’s play to catch up to hers.
“I told them: ‘We’re not going anywhere,’” said Watchorn of her postgame address to her team. “‘And know it’s not the end.’”
But for some of them, it is. And that, especially given just how well BU finally played on Saturday afternoon, is a real shame.
