Next Stop: History

My first college hockey memory involved sitting in the stands for a game between Boston College and Boston University. It was 1996, and BU was a defending national champion with a roster stocked with guys easily identifiable to a 10-year old kid from Malden. BC had a new, young head coach in Jerry York, who, like Jack Parker, grew up in the area and returned home to coach his alma mater, but even the most upstart, plucky team would have had issues facing off against that Terriers team.

I was a BC fan to my core after my dad purchased football season tickets during the Tom Coughlin era, and scoring tickets to a BC-BU game because his friend had a commitment and couldn't use his seats at Walter Brown felt like a golden ticket to the Wonka factory. BU was loaded, but faced a BC team that tied it one night earlier at Conte Forum, and the Eagles were actively building something under York, a national champion who returned home after the Mike Milbury fiasco.

More than 20 years later, I can still close my eyes and hear the chants that I definitely can't repeat in front of my kids. I can see my seats with the goal mouth situated under the press box on my left, and I very vividly recall the packed concourse. I can hear my dad telling me to grab some wall space during intermission to avoid the cramped crowd, and I often wonder if that game pushed me onto the road that led to my current life as a college hockey writer (for anyone who doesn't know, this year moved me closer to a decade of writing at the national level).

One thing that doesn't change is my appreciation for the rivalry itself. Working in hockey exposed me to the small community within the sport, but I tongue-in-cheek root for my local sides to install Massachusetts as the top hockey state in the country. It's territorial in a sense, but the battles between BC and BU are, to me, one of the greatest parts of college hockey because they date back to an earlier era. The game is much more national - international, even - but BC-BU still feels like a neighborhood rivalry. Bragging rights matter almost as much as trophies in that regard.

Both teams are among the top teams in the country, but through it all, there's never been a moment when both teams were the top teams in the country. The all-time matchup dates back to World War I, but none of the 291 prior games between the Eagles and Terriers ever featured teams ranked simultaneously as the No. 1 and No. 2 team in a poll. There weren't exactly national polls in those days, but all the hype and all the good, clean community hate never produced a Boston-based matchup of those proportions outside of the 1979 national championship game hosted by Providence, Rhode Island.

There's never been anything like a 1-vs.-2 matchup between the two teams most identifiable with Boston.

Until now.

On Friday night, No. 2 Boston College hosts No. 1 Boston University in the first of three matchups over the next 10 days. A series that starts at Conte Forum will shift to Agganis Arena before the first Monday in February's Beanpot semifinal at TD Garden.

In the 100-plus years of the Green Line Rivalry, a rivalry that nearly predates the actual B Branch of the MBTA, there's never been a time like this.

"It's great that both teams are doing well," said head coach Greg Brown. "Personally, I think that the rivalry is always there, and now it's going to get more national coverage because both teams had such good first halves. To the players, it doesn't go away. It's always there, and the intensity is always there if the teams are having good seasons or average seasons. It doesn't go away on the ice."

Hockey is a unique entity compared to the rest of the college sports universe. Five of its six conferences are leagues that aren't part of the traditional autonomous power structure throughout the remainder of sports, and the large chunk of its 60-plus programs are grandfathered teams originating in Division II or Division III athletics departments. Its traditional power structure was drawn by the local high school circuits in Minnesota and Massachusetts, and the early national champions were from universities and schools from the Midwest.

The sport's structure evolved and shifted over time, and even the more recent decades produced national champions that wouldn't shake the foundation of the basketball tournament. A Minnesota-Duluth, a Miami University, a Ferris State, a Quinnipiac and a Colorado College exists for every BC, Minnesota, or Michigan, and the most traditional powerhouses date back to teams at Denver, North Dakota, Maine, and others.

It's not unlike hockey itself, which started as a niche sport with a talent base in the hockey hotbeds of the Northeast and Midwest with an additional influx from the Canadian talent pool, and like anything else, the growth that sprouted into the NHL extended the manifest destiny into the Deep South and beyond.

The structure remained relatively small, but hockey's continued growth in the 1990s forced the NCAA Men's Ice Hockey Committee to create a system that objectively compared teams against one another. A mathematical evaluation was introduced, and its tinkering over time pushed the sport to exclusively evaluate its playoff field with an algorithm weighted against winning percentage, the average of an opponent's winning percentage, and the average of the winning percentage of the teams those teams faced (I guess we could call it the winning percentage of the enemy of my enemy).

The whole method and mechanism puts added weight on playing at home or on the road or winning in overtime while removing possible points losses for beating teams that lower a team's average just by showing up on the ice (playing games against "bad" teams enduring bad seasons), but the end result is a 16-team tournament field based on overall mathematics.

It's important to note, though, that it doesn't mean the best 16 teams automatically get into the tournament because each conference has an automatic bid. The No. 16 team, therefore, doesn't receive an at-large bid by finishing in the top-16 when a mid-major or lower-ranked team wins its conference, and because one or two leagues are always exclusively ranked outside the top-16, the Pairwise bubble forms and shifts on a regular basis.

It's irrespective of the human-voted poll, but BU and BC enter this weekend as the top two teams in both the USCHO.com poll voted on by journalists, coaches, scribes, and hockey people (including this intrepid reporter) and the mathematical Pairwise. They are, without question, clearly the two top teams in the nation.

"A huge part of trying to be successful is playing with the right amount of intensity," said Brown. "You have to keep a clear head and not get too jacked up. If you're not thinking clearly, then it's going to be a tough night for you. We talk about that, and these guys have been in big games before. They have a routine of how to keep themselves emotionally in check and playing their best hockey."

That would've been enough to provide wrinkles for the matchup, but there are additional settings factoring into the criticality of these matchups. From a 10,000-foot view, it's not a big deal if a team is ranked No. 1 or No. 2 because there's enough hockey left to figure out the top four seeds, but the NCAA Tournament is formatted in a way that might actually hurt the Eagles if they finish second behind the Terriers (or vice-versa).

From the cleanest perspective, the No. 1 team plays whichever team is No. 16 in the list of teams heading to the national tournament, and the No. 1 team is equally slotted to play closest to its home site for a sort-of home-ice advantage. In that utopian world, a BU-BC finish in the top-2 spots would allow both teams to play either in Springfield or Providence, and the bottom two teams qualifying for the tournament would be sent to their potential doom.

Host sites, though, are locked into playing in their own regional, which means that UMass would have to play in Springfield if it qualifies for the tournament. Given that the Atlantic Hockey and CCHA champions are likely going to be the last two teams into the tournament, the No. 14 team is therefore the last at-large bid unless an off-the-board conference champion emerges, and the Minutemen are virtually tied with both Providence and St. Cloud for one of the last spots in a regional.

If UMass lands in Springfield as the No. 4 seed, another rule prevents the selection committee from scheduling a Hockey East matchup in the first round wherever possible. The possibility exists that a team like North Dakota or Wisconsin could be sent to play in that regional while the lower of the BC-BU matchup is sent west to a regional in either Sioux Falls, South Dakota or Maryland Heights, Missouri, and where stipulations exist that could potentially keep the Eagles home against a Hockey East team (there could be upwards of six league teams in the tournament) the easiest road to playing locally is to ensure head-to-head comparisons against the Terriers don't break the wrong way.

That's on top of everything else that goes with a BC-BU matchup.

"We're satisfied with our record and where we are," said Brown. "We've played well enough to put ourselves in a good position. We're right behind BU in the league and in the Pairwise, and it's going to be a great test for us. They're right in front of us, and we're trying to catch up."

So here we are. Boston University and Boston College are No. 1 and No. 2 in the nation in hockey. The mathematical algorithm thinks they're the two best teams in college hockey. The Beanpot semifinal looms with a wink at the tongue-in-cheek joke about Northeastern or Harvard winning the championship after the Eagles or Terriers eliminate each other. Two of the oldest, most historic rivals in college hockey are battling one another for something that's never existed in the long history of the sport.

Until now.

No. 2 Boston College and No. 1 Boston University drop the puck on Friday at 7 p.m. from Conte Forum in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts before shifting to a 7 p.m. puck drop at Agganis Arena on Saturday night. Both games will be televised locally on NESN with radio coverage available through WEEI 850 AM.

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