Boston College Athletics
Photo by: Meg Kelly
The Puck Drop: Boston University
January 30, 2026 | Men's Hockey, #ForBoston Files
Game No. 299 from Agganis Arena brings the best of Boston back to the ice.
The city of Boston awoke on the morning of February 6, 1918 to an usually unrelenting and hard grip from Mother Nature's winter grasp. The nearby harbor remained gray and restless as icy edges tipped through the salty waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and streets rang with the scrape and clatter of streetcars cutting through frigid temperatures. Coal smoke hung over dense brick neighborhoods as a frozen reminder of the American industrial backbone and its impact on the faraway war in Europe, but the flags snapped along the city's byways as windswept skies lent no quarter to anyone brave enough to wander through the elements.
The city set records for below-zero conditions as it exacerbated a fuel shortage impacting approximately two dozen towns, but the conditions were ripe for hockey teams and skaters to step onto the frozen ponds and artificial rinks constructed throughout New England. At the newly-opened Boston Arena, twin-bill matchups between Massachusetts institutions provided cover for time-killing exercise and activities, and none were more present than during the inaugural meeting between Boston College and Boston University.
"Boston College scored two goals very early in its game with Boston University," screamed the next morning's periodical at The Boston Daily Globe. "Both points were made by [Walter] Falvey, the first point coming of a slow push shot made as Falvey crossed in front of goal tend Weatherbee, and the other coming quickly on the following face-off, Falvey dribbling only a few feet and then shooting through."
Eddie Enright's late goal staked Boston College's 3-1 victory over BU as the first-ever salvo fired between two schools preparing for fast neighborhood relations. Less than five years earlier, BC president Thomas Gasson led a purchase of Amos Adams Lawrence's farm to ensure the institution could survive as the region's college on the hill located just outside of downtown's dense trappings. BU president Lemuel Murlin, meanwhile, envisioned a more centralized location for the school and arranged for a move to a campus situated along the Charles River less than five miles from the Chestnut Hill border.
They were ideal neighbors in a region teeming with academic growth, but their true relationship blossomed from that inaugural meeting at Boston Arena. For over a century, the Eagles and Terriers have been annual fixtures against one another, and they've met in all except for four years since that lone meeting during the World War I era. They are, in a word, uninterrupted with the exception of a single year at the end of World War II. Not even blizzards, bad weather, power outages, building failures, pandemics or the rise of a new era in college sports has been able to split the two tentpole hockey programs in the Northeast.
Sitting on the verge of their 300th all-time meeting, a sport forever altered by algorithms, computers, mathematical formulas, physical realignment, transfer portals and the conference expansion or realignment is capable of reaching back into that bag of tricks for its oldest and most humble settings. Gone are the days when these teams traveled to Boston Arena - gone is even Boston Arena, having been vacated with the closure of Northeastern's Matthews Arena era - but the game, a single game, between Boston College and Boston University forever binds the ties of a city that's increasingly living in a time of segmented individuality.
On with the preview of the 299th edition of the Green Line Rivalry:
****
Weekend Storylines (Tropic Thunder Edition)
I know who I am. I'm the dude, playin' the dude, disguised as another dude! -Kirk Lazarus
Friday's puck drop marks the fourth straight year where BC and BU play one another in the two weeks prior to the first round of the Beanpot tournament. On nearly every occasion, a slew of national headlines grabbed attention in the run-up to the game while the shadow of the city championship clouded conversations about the future, but this year's game between the Eagles and Terriers offers a bit of a different perspective than the powerhouse matchups of the past two years because neither team sits near the top of the Division I rankings.
That said, BC-BU is one of the more critical games on the national radar because neither team is safely within the national tournament's National Collegiate Percentage Index rankings. That's especially true for the Terriers, who were once a team on the verge of breaking back into the top-15 teams in the NPI before they instead lost to UMass and UMass-Lowell before dropping two games to Providence, the second of which was a 4-0 shutout at home.Â
The resulting drop positioned them well outside of the bubble's cut line at No. 22, so a win over BC, which is the No. 14 team in the NPI, would serve them well, especially since half of their eight remaining games are against teams situated in lower rankings. A second game against BC lurks, but beating Northeastern and potentially advancing to a Beanpot championship game against either BC or Harvard - both higher than BU - is a big deal at this stage of the season.
I don't read the script. The script reads me. -Kirk Lazarus
BC, meanwhile, is in a very different position that ultimately leads to the same spot as BU. Sitting at No. 14 in the NPI technically places the Eagles inside of the 15-team bubble, but all it takes is two unranked or lower-ranked conference champions to therefore knock BC out of the tournament if things started on Friday night. As a reminder, the national tournament is 16 teams, but each conference receives an automatic bid for its postseason champion. Atlantic Hockey America's highest-ranked team is No. 26 Bentley, so No. 16 Augustana is automatically eliminated by the league's postseason champion. No. 15 UConn is therefore the last team in the tournament with No. 14 BC sitting one spot higher.
The large bulk of teams outside of the Big Ten and NCHC are outside of the bubble, though. Three of the top-5 teams are from the Big Ten with No. 3 North Dakota, No. 5 Western Michigan and No. 6 Minnesota-Duluth sprinkled within a top-10 that otherwise features two ECAC teams and another Big Ten program in Wisconsin. Requiring those teams to drop would then require them to either lose games en masse or drop games to teams significantly lower in the NPI.
For No. 8 Quinnipiac, No. 9 Cornell and No. 12 Dartmouth, games against steadily-dropping Princeton, No. 34 Union, No. 40 Clarkson and the lower-rated teams from RPI or Brown are critical to uphold the league's three bids, and No. 11 St. Thomas simply can't lose to teams within the CCHA. It also means that a chaotic postseason is more likely to produce three-to-four conference champions from outside of the top-15.
That's a big reason why playoffstatus.com - a leading mathematical probability website trusted by nearly everyone in college hockey - only gives BC a 51 percent chance of making the national tournament. In one of the more obvious statements of the year, winning increases that number while losing drops its probability.Â
The universe is talking to us right now. You just gotta listen. -Les Grossman
BC-BU always carries implications for the Hockey East postseason because, well, Hockey East points are always at a premium, but the slim differences between teams in the league table has this game under a hyperactive microscope before next Monday's Beanpot. The fact that BU carries at least one game played over every other team in the conference doesn't help the Terriers gain ground against the Providence-BC-UConn triumvirate atop the conference, but there's the old saying that games in hand are only good if they turn into wins.
Beanpot games aside, BU needs league points to avoid playing in the first round of the conference playoffs. The Terriers are tied with UMass for fourth place with 24 points but sit within a single game of Maine's 21-point output. Knowing that the Black Bears host Providence for a single-game series at Alfond Arena on Saturday therefore puts the Terriers in the position of needing a win to avoid slipping backwards. Even with the Friars sitting atop the league, Maine's 9-4-0 record at home is tied for tops in the league with Northeastern, which no longer has a home building. BU, meanwhile, is 5-7-1 at home, which means that the Terriers desperately need to gain points while Northeastern, the other team sitting in fifth place, plays UMass on Friday.
Each of those teams are clearly involved in the race for both a bye and home ice in the quarterfinals, and each carries their own rights towards the national tournament. Understanding that the Hockey East playoffs are single-elimination throughout its four rounds places added and extra pressure on the transition spots between fifth and sixth place to avoid playing one possibly-derailing game.
*****
Question Box
But, like, can you give us some head-to-head details, Dan?
Okay, enough talk about the national and league picture here. From a head-to-head perspective, this is actually one of the weirder meetups between BC and BU because the Eagles gathered steam in their sweep over New Hampshire. The natural lineup changes forced by the midseason acquisition of Oscar Hemming are no longer as painful as the initial growing pains at the start of the second half of the year, and depth options behind the top line are developing more rapidly with more time together. Last week's 3-0 win over the Wildcats, for example, featured Will Vote's first career collegiate hat trick while the previous night's game at Conte Forum included goals from the emerging top candidates from the season.Â
At this stage of the year, it's no longer a surprise that Dean Letourneau scored twice and assisted on Jake Sondreal's second period goal, and the pleasantness behind his production should morph, at some point, into expectations of a burgeoning chemistry with a back line that's including players who are capable of moving the puck.
How does BU match that emerging production?
The problem for BU hasn't actually been goal-scoring. The shutout against Providence carries a bit of recency bias worth acknowledging, but the Terriers scored a minimum of three goals in their previous four games. The bigger problem emerged when they lost two of those games while slamming the door in two of those other games.
Target numbers likely help in this situation because Mikhail Yegorov hasn't been at his best as the numbers get higher. He allowed three goals on 16 shots in the second period of the overtime loss to UMass-Lowell but defeated the River Hawks with a 12-save third period because he only faced 23 shots in the game. As games have worn forward, he's been forced to struggle when he's faced more shots on goal, which seems a bit obvious but is worth noting because the 4-3 loss to Providence included 40 saves. As for the 4-0 loss, well I got nothing there because he only saw 26 shots on goal, but at least only one of them was an empty net goal?
Does home ice advantage matter in a one-game series?
BC and BU play each other enough to suggest that home ice advantage doesn't matter until a team gets to TD Garden. Just six of the last 10 meetings occurred on campus to the tune of a 4-2 advantage for the Eagles, and a straight split among the remaining four games - either in the Beanpot or in the lone meeting in the Hockey East playoffs in 2024 - keeps these teams on an even keel against one another.
A single game series tends to skew those numbers. Even dating back to the era predating both Jay Pandolfo and Greg Brown, BC's success in a single game against BU is a stark contrast to the more recognizable home-and-home events, and last year's Beanpot loss at TD Garden was just the second time that the Eagles dropped a one-game series to BU since the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps less fortunate is that it happened two years in a row, but those one-off games included three wins since the 2020-2021 season.
*****
Scoreboard Watching
Teams still harboring national tournament at-large bids are starting to run out of runway for their candidacies. Because there's no selection committee, the bottom line is that they have to win enough games to statistically qualify for those spots mentioned above. For Michigan State and Penn State, that's not a problem, and wins and losses against one another shouldn't impact their fight for a No. 1 seed in the tournament.Â
Any team situated in the lower half of the top-15 needs to play with a sense of urgency, and that means that Quinnipiac absolutely cannot lose a game at St. Lawrence to a team that's 3-20-3. Likewise looking at next week's schedule, losses to Brown and Yale, particularly at home, would damage that candidacy enough to send the Bobcats flailing down the NPI.
Enter Cornell, which is on the road at Brown and Yale. The Big Red have exactly one game remaining against a team that's situated within the NPI's bubble - Quinnipiac - and play Colgate, RPI and St. Lawrence alongside that series against the southern New England Ivies. One or two losses from that group is likely to send them flying further down the rankings.
Both of them are in better position than a Dartmouth team that's in freefall after its No. 1 start to the season. A loss to Princeton coupled with a tie against Clarkson and a sweep at Cornell and Colgate dropped the Big Green to No. 12 in the NPI, and while Union is well above .500, bringing the Garnet Chargers to Hanover alongside RPI leaves little room for any kind of error.Â
Ditto for No. 11 St. Thomas, which hosts Michigan Tech this weekend. The strength of the CCHA and the power associated with the Huskies and next week's opponent at Bowling Green likely keeps the Tommies in the hunt for a couple of more weeks unless the roof caves on Mendota Heights, but it won't hurt to have a two-game swing against Augustana before the season-ending series at Bemidji State. Wins in any of those games should keep them well above the cut line, and there's enough fire power within those rankings to absorb one or two losses, depending on what happens with other teams.
Atlantic Hockey America remains the only conference outside of the bubble, but No. 26 Bentley took a win and tie against Princeton ahead of this week's trip to Robert Morris. The Falcons are a natural enemy for the seeding procedure if teams below them start winning games, and that's the cut line for the No. 16 seed. As BC fans conceivably remember, the No. 16 seed is normally the lowest-seeded team and is locked into a first round NCAA game against the No. 1 overall seed.Â
*****
Dan's Non-Hockey Thought of the Week
It's strange to think that my wife and I hadn't experienced a traditional blizzard since we bought our house. Moving to the Metrowest section of Massachusetts ensured a location within the long-rumored "snow belt" that gets walloped by any storm coming on a northeastern track, but we hadn't experienced anything over an eight-inch storm since we bought our house before the pandemic.
Sunday night naturally changed all of that, and I wound up needing to clear snow for four days during the post-storm cleanup. The driveway, the roof, the backyard, literally anywhere that touched the house - she wanted it cleared out of fear that the sub-zero temperatures would create ice dams and frost heaves for later troubles. As a result, my body underwent a shovel-based beatdown for the better part of the week.
The roof was especially tricky. I'm not a small human, so climbing up to the top of my house resulted in a small panic attack when I looked down at the yard. My house isn't particularly high, but the image of slipping off the roof and landing in the fresh powder didn't necessarily appeal to my greater senses. I wanted off that thing as soon as I got up there.
Unfortunately, I was a little ways away from the ladder and had to shimmy my way across my roof to get back to it before struggling to put my feet on the down-climb. Naturally, my neighbors had a full view of me swimming across the snow in a feeble attempt to not fall and splatter across my driveway, so I hope they enjoyed the show before I climbed back down.
Immediate text message to my wife: "Some men are not meant to defy gravity."
I'll leave that part to my brother-in-law, who, as a firefighter, isn't petrified of roofs.
*****
Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts
When you think about Boston, Harvard and MIT are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park. - John Williams
Friday night marks the 299th meeting between Boston College and Boston University. It's one of the few athletic events that can stop the city in its tracks, and it's built into those dingy and dimly-lit rinks that housed our childhood dreams. It divides households and splits siblings along parochial lines, but it unites us through a passion for something greater. It's wholly ours, and whether it's along the Charles River or situated in Chestnut Hill, it's the best of Boston, now and forever.
No. 13 Boston College drops the puck against Boston University on Friday night at 7 p.m. from Agganis Arena in Boston, Massachusetts. Television coverage available through the ESPN Plus streaming platform on the network's family of Internet and mobile device apps with additional coverage NESN, with additional streaming through the NESN 360 app for cable subscribers with access to the channel.
The city set records for below-zero conditions as it exacerbated a fuel shortage impacting approximately two dozen towns, but the conditions were ripe for hockey teams and skaters to step onto the frozen ponds and artificial rinks constructed throughout New England. At the newly-opened Boston Arena, twin-bill matchups between Massachusetts institutions provided cover for time-killing exercise and activities, and none were more present than during the inaugural meeting between Boston College and Boston University.
"Boston College scored two goals very early in its game with Boston University," screamed the next morning's periodical at The Boston Daily Globe. "Both points were made by [Walter] Falvey, the first point coming of a slow push shot made as Falvey crossed in front of goal tend Weatherbee, and the other coming quickly on the following face-off, Falvey dribbling only a few feet and then shooting through."
Eddie Enright's late goal staked Boston College's 3-1 victory over BU as the first-ever salvo fired between two schools preparing for fast neighborhood relations. Less than five years earlier, BC president Thomas Gasson led a purchase of Amos Adams Lawrence's farm to ensure the institution could survive as the region's college on the hill located just outside of downtown's dense trappings. BU president Lemuel Murlin, meanwhile, envisioned a more centralized location for the school and arranged for a move to a campus situated along the Charles River less than five miles from the Chestnut Hill border.
They were ideal neighbors in a region teeming with academic growth, but their true relationship blossomed from that inaugural meeting at Boston Arena. For over a century, the Eagles and Terriers have been annual fixtures against one another, and they've met in all except for four years since that lone meeting during the World War I era. They are, in a word, uninterrupted with the exception of a single year at the end of World War II. Not even blizzards, bad weather, power outages, building failures, pandemics or the rise of a new era in college sports has been able to split the two tentpole hockey programs in the Northeast.
Sitting on the verge of their 300th all-time meeting, a sport forever altered by algorithms, computers, mathematical formulas, physical realignment, transfer portals and the conference expansion or realignment is capable of reaching back into that bag of tricks for its oldest and most humble settings. Gone are the days when these teams traveled to Boston Arena - gone is even Boston Arena, having been vacated with the closure of Northeastern's Matthews Arena era - but the game, a single game, between Boston College and Boston University forever binds the ties of a city that's increasingly living in a time of segmented individuality.
On with the preview of the 299th edition of the Green Line Rivalry:
****
Weekend Storylines (Tropic Thunder Edition)
I know who I am. I'm the dude, playin' the dude, disguised as another dude! -Kirk Lazarus
Friday's puck drop marks the fourth straight year where BC and BU play one another in the two weeks prior to the first round of the Beanpot tournament. On nearly every occasion, a slew of national headlines grabbed attention in the run-up to the game while the shadow of the city championship clouded conversations about the future, but this year's game between the Eagles and Terriers offers a bit of a different perspective than the powerhouse matchups of the past two years because neither team sits near the top of the Division I rankings.
That said, BC-BU is one of the more critical games on the national radar because neither team is safely within the national tournament's National Collegiate Percentage Index rankings. That's especially true for the Terriers, who were once a team on the verge of breaking back into the top-15 teams in the NPI before they instead lost to UMass and UMass-Lowell before dropping two games to Providence, the second of which was a 4-0 shutout at home.Â
The resulting drop positioned them well outside of the bubble's cut line at No. 22, so a win over BC, which is the No. 14 team in the NPI, would serve them well, especially since half of their eight remaining games are against teams situated in lower rankings. A second game against BC lurks, but beating Northeastern and potentially advancing to a Beanpot championship game against either BC or Harvard - both higher than BU - is a big deal at this stage of the season.
I don't read the script. The script reads me. -Kirk Lazarus
BC, meanwhile, is in a very different position that ultimately leads to the same spot as BU. Sitting at No. 14 in the NPI technically places the Eagles inside of the 15-team bubble, but all it takes is two unranked or lower-ranked conference champions to therefore knock BC out of the tournament if things started on Friday night. As a reminder, the national tournament is 16 teams, but each conference receives an automatic bid for its postseason champion. Atlantic Hockey America's highest-ranked team is No. 26 Bentley, so No. 16 Augustana is automatically eliminated by the league's postseason champion. No. 15 UConn is therefore the last team in the tournament with No. 14 BC sitting one spot higher.
The large bulk of teams outside of the Big Ten and NCHC are outside of the bubble, though. Three of the top-5 teams are from the Big Ten with No. 3 North Dakota, No. 5 Western Michigan and No. 6 Minnesota-Duluth sprinkled within a top-10 that otherwise features two ECAC teams and another Big Ten program in Wisconsin. Requiring those teams to drop would then require them to either lose games en masse or drop games to teams significantly lower in the NPI.
For No. 8 Quinnipiac, No. 9 Cornell and No. 12 Dartmouth, games against steadily-dropping Princeton, No. 34 Union, No. 40 Clarkson and the lower-rated teams from RPI or Brown are critical to uphold the league's three bids, and No. 11 St. Thomas simply can't lose to teams within the CCHA. It also means that a chaotic postseason is more likely to produce three-to-four conference champions from outside of the top-15.
That's a big reason why playoffstatus.com - a leading mathematical probability website trusted by nearly everyone in college hockey - only gives BC a 51 percent chance of making the national tournament. In one of the more obvious statements of the year, winning increases that number while losing drops its probability.Â
The universe is talking to us right now. You just gotta listen. -Les Grossman
BC-BU always carries implications for the Hockey East postseason because, well, Hockey East points are always at a premium, but the slim differences between teams in the league table has this game under a hyperactive microscope before next Monday's Beanpot. The fact that BU carries at least one game played over every other team in the conference doesn't help the Terriers gain ground against the Providence-BC-UConn triumvirate atop the conference, but there's the old saying that games in hand are only good if they turn into wins.
Beanpot games aside, BU needs league points to avoid playing in the first round of the conference playoffs. The Terriers are tied with UMass for fourth place with 24 points but sit within a single game of Maine's 21-point output. Knowing that the Black Bears host Providence for a single-game series at Alfond Arena on Saturday therefore puts the Terriers in the position of needing a win to avoid slipping backwards. Even with the Friars sitting atop the league, Maine's 9-4-0 record at home is tied for tops in the league with Northeastern, which no longer has a home building. BU, meanwhile, is 5-7-1 at home, which means that the Terriers desperately need to gain points while Northeastern, the other team sitting in fifth place, plays UMass on Friday.
Each of those teams are clearly involved in the race for both a bye and home ice in the quarterfinals, and each carries their own rights towards the national tournament. Understanding that the Hockey East playoffs are single-elimination throughout its four rounds places added and extra pressure on the transition spots between fifth and sixth place to avoid playing one possibly-derailing game.
*****
Question Box
But, like, can you give us some head-to-head details, Dan?
Okay, enough talk about the national and league picture here. From a head-to-head perspective, this is actually one of the weirder meetups between BC and BU because the Eagles gathered steam in their sweep over New Hampshire. The natural lineup changes forced by the midseason acquisition of Oscar Hemming are no longer as painful as the initial growing pains at the start of the second half of the year, and depth options behind the top line are developing more rapidly with more time together. Last week's 3-0 win over the Wildcats, for example, featured Will Vote's first career collegiate hat trick while the previous night's game at Conte Forum included goals from the emerging top candidates from the season.Â
At this stage of the year, it's no longer a surprise that Dean Letourneau scored twice and assisted on Jake Sondreal's second period goal, and the pleasantness behind his production should morph, at some point, into expectations of a burgeoning chemistry with a back line that's including players who are capable of moving the puck.
How does BU match that emerging production?
The problem for BU hasn't actually been goal-scoring. The shutout against Providence carries a bit of recency bias worth acknowledging, but the Terriers scored a minimum of three goals in their previous four games. The bigger problem emerged when they lost two of those games while slamming the door in two of those other games.
Target numbers likely help in this situation because Mikhail Yegorov hasn't been at his best as the numbers get higher. He allowed three goals on 16 shots in the second period of the overtime loss to UMass-Lowell but defeated the River Hawks with a 12-save third period because he only faced 23 shots in the game. As games have worn forward, he's been forced to struggle when he's faced more shots on goal, which seems a bit obvious but is worth noting because the 4-3 loss to Providence included 40 saves. As for the 4-0 loss, well I got nothing there because he only saw 26 shots on goal, but at least only one of them was an empty net goal?
Does home ice advantage matter in a one-game series?
BC and BU play each other enough to suggest that home ice advantage doesn't matter until a team gets to TD Garden. Just six of the last 10 meetings occurred on campus to the tune of a 4-2 advantage for the Eagles, and a straight split among the remaining four games - either in the Beanpot or in the lone meeting in the Hockey East playoffs in 2024 - keeps these teams on an even keel against one another.
A single game series tends to skew those numbers. Even dating back to the era predating both Jay Pandolfo and Greg Brown, BC's success in a single game against BU is a stark contrast to the more recognizable home-and-home events, and last year's Beanpot loss at TD Garden was just the second time that the Eagles dropped a one-game series to BU since the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps less fortunate is that it happened two years in a row, but those one-off games included three wins since the 2020-2021 season.
*****
Scoreboard Watching
Teams still harboring national tournament at-large bids are starting to run out of runway for their candidacies. Because there's no selection committee, the bottom line is that they have to win enough games to statistically qualify for those spots mentioned above. For Michigan State and Penn State, that's not a problem, and wins and losses against one another shouldn't impact their fight for a No. 1 seed in the tournament.Â
Any team situated in the lower half of the top-15 needs to play with a sense of urgency, and that means that Quinnipiac absolutely cannot lose a game at St. Lawrence to a team that's 3-20-3. Likewise looking at next week's schedule, losses to Brown and Yale, particularly at home, would damage that candidacy enough to send the Bobcats flailing down the NPI.
Enter Cornell, which is on the road at Brown and Yale. The Big Red have exactly one game remaining against a team that's situated within the NPI's bubble - Quinnipiac - and play Colgate, RPI and St. Lawrence alongside that series against the southern New England Ivies. One or two losses from that group is likely to send them flying further down the rankings.
Both of them are in better position than a Dartmouth team that's in freefall after its No. 1 start to the season. A loss to Princeton coupled with a tie against Clarkson and a sweep at Cornell and Colgate dropped the Big Green to No. 12 in the NPI, and while Union is well above .500, bringing the Garnet Chargers to Hanover alongside RPI leaves little room for any kind of error.Â
Ditto for No. 11 St. Thomas, which hosts Michigan Tech this weekend. The strength of the CCHA and the power associated with the Huskies and next week's opponent at Bowling Green likely keeps the Tommies in the hunt for a couple of more weeks unless the roof caves on Mendota Heights, but it won't hurt to have a two-game swing against Augustana before the season-ending series at Bemidji State. Wins in any of those games should keep them well above the cut line, and there's enough fire power within those rankings to absorb one or two losses, depending on what happens with other teams.
Atlantic Hockey America remains the only conference outside of the bubble, but No. 26 Bentley took a win and tie against Princeton ahead of this week's trip to Robert Morris. The Falcons are a natural enemy for the seeding procedure if teams below them start winning games, and that's the cut line for the No. 16 seed. As BC fans conceivably remember, the No. 16 seed is normally the lowest-seeded team and is locked into a first round NCAA game against the No. 1 overall seed.Â
*****
Dan's Non-Hockey Thought of the Week
It's strange to think that my wife and I hadn't experienced a traditional blizzard since we bought our house. Moving to the Metrowest section of Massachusetts ensured a location within the long-rumored "snow belt" that gets walloped by any storm coming on a northeastern track, but we hadn't experienced anything over an eight-inch storm since we bought our house before the pandemic.
Sunday night naturally changed all of that, and I wound up needing to clear snow for four days during the post-storm cleanup. The driveway, the roof, the backyard, literally anywhere that touched the house - she wanted it cleared out of fear that the sub-zero temperatures would create ice dams and frost heaves for later troubles. As a result, my body underwent a shovel-based beatdown for the better part of the week.
The roof was especially tricky. I'm not a small human, so climbing up to the top of my house resulted in a small panic attack when I looked down at the yard. My house isn't particularly high, but the image of slipping off the roof and landing in the fresh powder didn't necessarily appeal to my greater senses. I wanted off that thing as soon as I got up there.
Unfortunately, I was a little ways away from the ladder and had to shimmy my way across my roof to get back to it before struggling to put my feet on the down-climb. Naturally, my neighbors had a full view of me swimming across the snow in a feeble attempt to not fall and splatter across my driveway, so I hope they enjoyed the show before I climbed back down.
Immediate text message to my wife: "Some men are not meant to defy gravity."
I'll leave that part to my brother-in-law, who, as a firefighter, isn't petrified of roofs.
*****
Pregame Quote and Final Thoughts
When you think about Boston, Harvard and MIT are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park. - John Williams
Friday night marks the 299th meeting between Boston College and Boston University. It's one of the few athletic events that can stop the city in its tracks, and it's built into those dingy and dimly-lit rinks that housed our childhood dreams. It divides households and splits siblings along parochial lines, but it unites us through a passion for something greater. It's wholly ours, and whether it's along the Charles River or situated in Chestnut Hill, it's the best of Boston, now and forever.
No. 13 Boston College drops the puck against Boston University on Friday night at 7 p.m. from Agganis Arena in Boston, Massachusetts. Television coverage available through the ESPN Plus streaming platform on the network's family of Internet and mobile device apps with additional coverage NESN, with additional streaming through the NESN 360 app for cable subscribers with access to the channel.
Players Mentioned
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/ Men's Hockey
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/ Men's Hockey
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/ Men's Hockey
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