Queen Terriers overthrown by Northeastern
Cinderella Huskies reward Schelling for early labor
By Al Daniel
One stopper saved her best show of the year for the climactic weekend of the pennant race. The other grudgingly saved her greatest glitch yet.
Northeastern’s Florence Schelling withstood 24 out of 25 tests from almighty Boston University en route to a Hockey East postseason record 44 blocks, helping her Huskies dislodge the defending champions, 4-2, in the semifinals at Walter Brown Arena.
Schelling, now a veteran of five college playoff games and two Olympic tournaments, simply reaped the rewards of extra experience in her arm-wrestling bout with BU’s rookie, Kerrin Sperry. Conversely, in only her third losing effort out of 25 starts, Sperry authorized four opposing goals for the first time in her young Terrier career.
“Florence probably won the goaltending duel,” admitted BU head coach Brian Durocher. “But we’re pretty excited to have Kerrin Sperry. She’s had a fantastic year for us and I don’t think she’s the one at fault here. We as a team didn’t necessarily complete what was a pretty good effort.
“I’m not a fan of giving up four goals and I don’t put that blame on a goaltender or any one person. I just don’t like to see four up on the board.”
For a time, though, the only digits that were really glowering from above center ice sat under the Terriers’ shots heading. The hosts owned the shooting gallery, 25-9, after 20 minutes and kept the Huskies off the right side of the scoresheet until shortly after the halfway mark of the second period.
The fact that Schelling propped up a sustainable 1-0 difference clouded several warning signs of a royal uprising by the reigning champs. The first period onslaught was sparked, in part, by two unanswered Northeastern penalties within the first five minutes.
Although the Hounds got through all that unscathed, they didn’t express much gratitude when they subsequently earned three unanswered power plays.
The BU penalty killers spent substantial time pestering Schelling on every shift. Ultimately, in those three 5-on-4 segments in the latter phases of the opening frame, Northeastern was outshot by a combined count of 6-5.
Worse yet, only 33 seconds after returning to the ice from a tripping sentence, Terriers’ top gun Jenn Wakefield broke the ice with 4:04 left till intermission.
But paradoxically, upon holding out with the minimal one-goal deficit until that merciful buzzer, the Huskies believed they were in a favorable position.
“We came out a little bit on our heels and BU took it to us in those first 20 minutes,” said Huskies’ coach Dave Flint. “I knew they were going to come out hard.
“I just tried to tell the team ‘If we can weather that storm in the beginning and keep it close and we stay in the game, we’re going to build some momentum.’ And that’s what happened. We hung around. And we’re a pretty dangerous team when you let us hang around.”
The second period was mostly a skate-and-reload multitask project for the Terriers, who mustered only six shots while Northeastern registered 10. None other than senior co-captains Alyssa Wohlfeiler and Julia Marty both tuned the mesh –at 10:18 and 14:45, respectively- on nimble one-timers that turned Sperry to stone and found a gaping slab in the cage.
Wakefield replenished the home crowd’s spirits at 17:50, absorbing a diagonal pass from point patroller Catherine Ward and flicking it to the left of Schelling to draw a 2-2 knot. But rookies Claire Santostefano and Katie MacSorley collaborated on their first shift of the third for a rush that culminated in Santostefano’s eventual game-clincher at the 1:13 mark.
From there, the Terriers might as well have switched to their red sweaters the way they frenetically, but no less threateningly, hunted for another equalizer the same way the CCCP did one day in Lake Placid some 31-odd years ago.
A mere 83 seconds after Santostefano struck, Casie Fields was whistled for tripping to give BU its fourth power play of the day. The Terriers took two shots on that advantage and pelted Schelling a total of 15 times in the closing frame, while only letting Sperry come in on six plays in their zone.
“I looked up there and it seemed like the clock was barely moving,” said Flint. “It gets pretty nerve racking.
“When it got to be about the five-minute mark, I think I settled down a little bit. I calmed my nerves a little bit, because I felt like we were doing the little things right. We were putting the puck in the safe spaces, we were making good decisions, we had good game management, we weren’t running around, we weren’t frantic, so that kind of settled me down more. But that last half of that period kind of dragged out.”
Although, with 6:51 to spare, Wohlfeiler extracted some of her team’s concealed panic and pasted it on the psyches of their hosts. In an odd-man rush, she carried the puck along the far lane, circumvented a tire-blown backchecker in Carly Warren, and roofed an insurance strike for the assertive 4-2 lead.
“It was a great game for us,” concluded Schelling. “We had such a good team spirit going on. We didn’t have anything to lose. We didn’t have any pressure, so that was definitely a great thing, and we totally pulled it off.”
Al Daniel is the Hockey East correspondent to Beyond The Dashers
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