At 11:35 PM 1/19/96, Deron Treadwell wrote [on INFO-HOCKEY-L]:
>Boston University 4  Maine 3
 
This was a truly great game to watch!  Heather & I got some Chinese food
and sat down to enjoy the battle, and it lived up to its billing.
 
>FIRST PERIOD:
[...]
>The game was played at a frantic pace.
 
Boy, was it ever.  The first period was played with the intensity and speed
of an NCAA tournament game.
 
>Allison played one of his best games of his career in
>net in my opinion.  It may have been his greatest, but a bad third period
>and the loss in the record book prevented that IMHO.
 
I thought both goalies had superb nights.  Allison can't be blamed for the
third period explosion by BU.  A lesser goalie might have allowed 7 or 8
goals with the onslaught BU had.  I couldn't find a single goal to blame on
Allison.
 
>SECOND PERIOD:
[...]
>But Maine would break the ice on the power-play.  Mike Grier couldn't move
>Trevor Roenick (imagine that!) out in front and Roenick got the redirection
>as Tory threw it to the net.  The goal came at 11:17, and made it 1-0.
 
This was an unusual goal...the dump into the corner by Tory actually hit a
weird spot in the boards and caromed right out to Roenick in front, and
Roenick turned and beat Noble to the far side.  With the way the game was
going, it figured that it would take a weird goal for someone to get on the
board.  I think neither Grier nor Noble expected the puck to bounce out
like that and before they knew what happened, Roenick had scored.
 
[...]
>Maine scored on the power-play as Dan Shermerhorn
>netted his eighth of the year from Jeff Tory and Brett Clark at 16:49 to
>make it 2-0 Maine.  Tory was able to keep the puck in at the blue line, but
>just barely.  It was so close, that two BU players broke the other way.
>Tory slipped it to Clark who took the shot, Shermerhorn poked it home.
 
What a great play this was by Clark.  If he had wound up for a slap shot,
the BU forward who was pressuring would have blocked it and possibly
started a rush going the other way.  But Clark showed great poise by simply
flipping the puck towards the net instead, and Shermerhorn was able to
redirect it past Noble.  And Tory made the play by keeping it in while two
Terriers tried to clear it.  Not too many teams have a pair of defensemen
as good as Tory and Clark.
 
>THIRD PERIOD:
>
>However.. really good teams find a way to win.  BU came out in the third
>period, and took it to Maine like very few teams have EVER done to a
>University of Maine team.  Maine was severely out-played, out-shot and
>out-worked this period.  No college hockey fan couldn't help but be amazed.
 
You're not kidding.  I said after the second that I thought BU would come
back, but I didn't expect them to dominate in the way that they did against
a team as good as Maine.  Allison had to make a number of incredible saves
before BU finally got on the board.
 
[...]
>Then the roof caved in for Maine.  Doug Wood scored from Mike Sylvia at 4:04
>to make it 2-1, and then EIGHT SECONDS later Bob Pierce scored from Hynes to
>tie it at 2-2.  Boston University people said that might have been the
>loudest Walter Brown Arena has got in years.  Maine SID Matt Bourque said it
>was certainly the loudest he's ever heard it.
 
Two great plays by players not known for their offense helped turn the
tide...this is the strength of BU.  Wood's goal was a thing of beauty as he
rushed the puck, put a nice shift on a defender and shot it past Allison.
Allison wasn't to get a whole lot of help from his defense in this period.
Then off the draw, Hynes (fourth liner) made the play by drawing the
defenseman and flipping the puck to Pierce who was barreling towards the
net.
 
>Blair Allison was hurt on the play, and a very scary moment for Maine fans.
>With Blair Marsh still out with a seperated shoulder, Maine's only available
>goalie is Eric Geoffroy a sophomore transfer from Miami who has never
>appeared in an NCAA game.  Allison, however slow to get up, remained in the
>game.  It was good to see after Allison had played such a great game to this
>point.
 
Although it might not have been intended, it worked out great for Maine
that Allison was down for a while after the goal.  This gave the crowd time
to calm down and thwarted the momentum...possibly helping Maine to its
go-ahead goal.
 
>So at 4:12 it was 2-2, and BU continued to swarm, but Maine got another.
>Reg Cardinal scored at 5:53 just after it seemed BU would take over the game
>completely.  It was Cardinal's 7th of the year from Shermerhorn and Clark.
>
>Play opened up a little more however as the play went back to 4 on 4 as
>Cardinal received a penalty after his goal, and Bob LaChance got called for
>high sticking Tim Lovell.
 
I felt that the call on Cardinal was a bad one.  Jack Parker was calling
for a five minute major, and at first it looked like he did run the goalie.
But the replay showed that Kealty elbowed Cardinal in the back, thus
pushing him towards Noble, and then Kealty looked at the referee and
pointed at Cardinal as he fell on top of the goalie.  I was disappointed
that the WABU announcers (Doug Brown, Mike Eruzione) didn't say anything
about this - they seemed noticeably quiet as the replay was shown.  It
didn't affect the outcome, but the call allowed BU to regain some momentum
on the power play until Lachance's penalty.
 
[...]
>However, it was only a matter of time, and at 10:41 BU tied it at 3-3.  Jon
>Coleman got his 7th goal of the year from Sylvia and Wright.  Sylvia walked
>in and fed Coleman who found the back of the net.  The play all came about
>because Maine gave it away in their own zone.
 
Absolutely correct...I wondered how much the bad ice in the corner played a
part.  That corner was flooded with water all night long (high temperatures
in Boston) and it made it tough to move the puck out of there.  It's
interesting to note that six of the game's seven goals were scored at that
end of the ice (defended twice by Maine), and a couple may have been due in
part to the ice conditions.  Earlier in the period I had noted that Maine
should ask the referees for the rink crew to come out and clean up some of
the water.  I think it wasn't until after this goal that Maine finally
asked that this be done.
 
>After the goal, several matching penalties over a course of time resulted in
>a long period of 4 on 4 play.  Chris O'Sullivan got the game winnat from
>Pandolfo.  Once again Maine was out of position, running around and BU's
>offensive talent came to the top and bing-bang-boom.
 
I don't think Allison saw this one at all.  There were three guys in front
of him, two of his own, and O'Sullivan was playing D on the 4x4 and just
let the shot fly through the screen.
 
>POST-GAME:
[...]
>For Maine, they played their game for two periods.  Maine isn't going to win
>a shootout, they need to pay attention to defense and work on helping Blair
>Allison.
 
I thought that Maine's defense just didn't get the job done in the third
like they had in the first two.  They made mistakes that they were not
making in the first two periods, like having trouble getting the puck out
of the zone and also being caught standing around at times as BU flew past
them.  As you say later on, I wondered if the intense pace of the first
period and part of the second had taken its toll on Maine.
 
>BU is the class of Hockey East, and the class of Eastern Hockey.
>It is going to take an incredible effort by someone out west to unrail the
>train that's heading for Cinn.  They don't get enough credit for their
>defense, but they are solid, and with young, strong goaltending they are set
>for awhile to come.  I've seen them twice now this season, and they are
>BETTER than last years team, by far.
 
I agree.  They are much better than last year.  I think the difference lies
in that BU has more players who can hurt you than they did before - when
the big guns are kept silent, or not even playing as in some of the games
over the break, it has been the lesser known players who have stepped up to
score big goals or make the play.  You can contain them for some of the
game, but I don't know if anyone has been able to contain them for an
entire game.  It was Noble who kept them in a close game while Allison was
stoning them through the first two periods, but the incredible explosion of
the third was something that no goalie could have stopped.  I wonder when
the last time was that anyone put 27 shots on Maine in a period.
 
You do have to play 60 minutes to beat BU.  I thought this game was similar
to the two that BU played against Merrimack in that Merrimack also
contained BU through two periods each night, but when BU turned it up in
the third, they were unstoppable.
 
And look at who scored the BU goals tonight: Wood from Sylvia, Pierce from
Hynes, Coleman from Sylvia and Wright, O'Sullivan from Pandolfo.  The first
three goals were not scored by the players that come to mind when you think
of BU's offense.  Grier, Drury, Lachance, Bates, even O'Sullivan and
Pandolfo were all pretty much held off the board.  What makes BU awesome is
that even if you can shut down their first and second lines, their third
and fourth will still beat you.  And if you can't shut down those top two
lines, well, you might as well mail in the points and go home.
 
Noble is underrated, IMO (Larocque too).  He has consistently shown an
ability to step up in the big games, and that's what you want.  BU's
defense and goaltending are not the best in the country, but they don't
have to be.  If anyone is going to beat them in March, they are going to
have to stop their offense - plain and simple.  Even when BU tied BC last
week, they still outshot BC 65-25; it will take an opposing goalie playing
as well as Taylor did that night to beat them.  Their defense will play
well enough to give their offense a chance to win it for them, as they did
tonight.  BU fans may wince at me saying this, but I am ready to make them
the odds-on favorite to repeat, and I did not feel that way at the
beginning of the season.
 
As an aside, I don't think this BU team is as good as Maine's 1993 team,
but that's another topic.
 
NESN will have Northeastern-Merrimack tomorrow night, but it's too bad that
neither they nor WABU will be carrying the second game of this series.
Yet, I think if Maine had a chance at a split, they had to get this one.  I
see BU's big guns scoring more tomorrow night and the game might not be as
close.
 
Going unnoticed was the fact that Lowell vaulted from fourth into second
ahead of Maine and Providence as a result of Lowell's 5-1 win over the
Friars, who have dropped three straight.  But Lowell gets to play BU next
week, so the 2nd through 4th spots could continue to jumble a bit over the
next few games.  BU is certainly beginning to pull away from everyone else.
 
---                                                                   ---
Mike Machnik                   [log in to unmask]            *HMM* 11/13/93
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