Hockey East Championship Preview

Another novice winner bound to happen
Upset fever growing for NU, BC hopes third time’s a charm
By Al Daniel

For the second year in a row, the Women’s Hockey East championship game is guaranteed to deliver a lucky program its first pennant since the league’s inception in 2002.

Boston College, a two-time runner-up at the ingress and egress of New Hampshire’s 2006-09 dynasty, will engage Northeastern, whose last conference title game was in its final year as an ECAC constituent, at 1 p.m. Sunday at Boston University’s Walter Brown Arena.

“This league has grown year after year after year,” said BC head coach Katie King. “And it’s just really exciting. For both teams tomorrow and for all the teams in our league –you saw the sixth, seventh, and eighth-place seeds playing tough against the one-, two-, and three-seeds all year. It really shows how great our league has gotten and how any team can win in it.”

For the Huskies, this is an addendum to an innovation they helped to validate. Dave Flint’s arrival behind the bench in 2008-09 coincided with commissioner Joe Bertagna’s decision to expand the postseason bracket from four to six teams. With that, NU improved its overall record by five wins and garnered its first postseason passport in five years.

Flint’s pupils have since assumed the persona of an aspiring national powerhouse. Though still considerable strides away from such status, they can now make like BU from last season and find a springboard in the form of an automatic bid to the Elite Eight.

After bumping the first-place Terriers in Saturday’s semifinal, improving his staff’s playoff record to 2-2 after back-to-back quarterfinal losses in 2009 and 2010, Flint thought back to what he had told his active senior class upon his arrival in the Hub, when they were sophomores.

“I told them they had an opportunity to get this program back on track,” he said. “And it wasn’t going to be an overnight thing. It was going to be step-by-step. That first year, we made the tournament, last year we made the tournament as a higher seed (fourth) and it was a disappointment to lose in the first round.

“I gave the seniors a challenge this year. I said, ‘Listen, you can be the first Northeastern team to win a Hockey East playoff game and they stepped up, (provided) good leadership and now they’re playing with confidence. And I always say, when we get everybody playing with confidence, we’re a pretty good team.”

The Huskies were once subject to February frostbite, winning only three conference games post-New Year’s in 2009 and going 1-4-4 to curtain their 2009-10 schedule. This year, they lumbered into the postseason on a 0-4-4 sleepwalking streak and, as penance, had to go on the road to Connecticut for the wild card game.

But since then, they have won two straight do-or-die duels, outscoring their adversaries, 8-2. And in both cases, they conquered a team that they couldn’t beat in the regular season, having gone 0-1-2 in the season series with UConn and 0-3-1 versus the almighty Terriers.

They can keep that cathartic trend going with one more surprise on Sunday.

“BC, we’ve been knocking on their door,” Flint said. “We haven’t beaten them this year, but last time we lost 2-1 and we outshot them. We had some good chances.”

Of course, the Eagles have their own thrill ride in progress, having just overpowered Providence, 3-2, in overtime Saturday.

“They have a right to be pretty excited and to be able to take all of that in,” said King. “We talk about how you don’t get to play too many championship games, and to be able to take it all in and be excited and ready to play in the championship game, they have to be able to take a little bit of a deep breath.

“But we wanted to make sure that they were able to celebrate that, because it was a heck of a game and they did a great job.”

Al Daniel is the Hockey East correspondent to Beyond The Dashers