Hockey East’s regular season title: It’s nice, but…
By Joe Micik
…it’s not everything, and it’s certainly not a harbinger of things to come. Last weekend, I was at Conte Forum, and during the intermissions of the hockey game against UMass, I looked up to the rafters and saw countless banners celebrating our defending national championship team. Some of those banners were related to Hockey East, which spurred me on to thinking about the coming showdowns with New Hampshire tomorrow night and on Saturday. At stake will be the regular season title and the #1 seed in the Hockey East Tournament. This all begs the question: does it even matter?
The answer is no, but what does matter is how BC performs in those final two games. If the Eagles play well in both games but split the weekend series, losing the Hockey East regular season crown by one point, can anyone honestly say they’re going to be bothered? It may be discouraging for about ten minutes, but there are far loftier goals at stake in the weeks to come.
There is, of course, history’s example as well. I’m sure many of you recall last season, where the Eagles tied and won the last two games against New Hampshire, barely losing the regular season title, but rode their two-seed all the way to the Hockey East Tournament title and an NCAA Tournament one-seed. New Hampshire, on the other hand, got zapped in the first round by Vermont and their season was all downhill from there as they failed to qualify for the Frozen Four – but hey, at least they got the coveted regular season title, right? In fact, as you may also recall, BC didn’t win Hockey East’s regular-season title in 2008, either. New Hampshire finished in first that year also, and what they got for their trouble was a loss to BC in the Hockey East semifinals and a first-round exit in the NCAA Tournament.
There are even more examples, and I’ll give you one: Maine won the national championship in 1999 without winning the Hockey East regular season title OR the tournament (guess who won the regular season – that’s right, New Hampshire, the team Maine beat in the national title game to do it). As an interesting aside, the Eagles won the Hockey East Tournament in 1999 but brought home no national championship.
The whole purpose of this article is to give Eagles hockey fans some perspective, so that we may all keep our priorities straight. The bottom line of what I’m saying is that these two games against UNH matter, but they don’t matter more than what is to come. The Hockey East Tournament matters, but it also doesn’t matter as much as the big tournament that looms. We all know that the BC Eagles will be in that NCAA Tournament with a chance to defend their title, and the momentum they have going into said tournament would be of some assistance, but if this weekend doesn’t go our way, it’s no reason to panic. If it doesn’t, in fact, history shows that it will be nothing more than a hollow victory for the Wildcats, anyway, though I’m not one to take things for granted. Enjoy the games this weekend; if BC wins and has another banner to hoist, then that’s great, but the goal for this team hasn’t changed. That’s all this weekend would mean – another banner – and hardly an important one considering what the Eagles are aiming to achieve once again.