A tie never felt so good.<\/p>\n
New Hampshire stormed all the way back from a three goal deficit in the third period to tie No. 5 Boston College, 3-3, and claim the Hockey East regular season title outright in front of their home crowd at the Whittemore Center in Durham, N.H. on Friday night.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what to say to be honest with you; things weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t looking good in the second period\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6but we played a solid third period and this team just finds ways to battle back,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d New Hampshire head coach Dick Umile said.<\/p>\n
The Wildcats came back to tie the game with three third period goals, capped off by sophomore defenseman Blake Kessel who tied the game with a rocket from the point that rang off the crossbar and dropped in for a power-play goal at 16:05 of the third period.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I had the open lane and stepped out to the middle, [Paul] Thompson had a great screen and I got it off quick and it found its way in somehow,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Kessel said.<\/p>\n
Freshman forward John Henrion scored to cut the Eagles\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 lead to 3-1 less than two minutes into the third period and sophomore forward Kevin McCarey cut the Boston College lead to 3-2 with a goal at 8:33. Henrion scored with a quick wrist shot right off the faceoff and McCarey stuffed a rebound through freshman goalie Parker Milner.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think the faceoff play, Henrion\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s goal, was huge,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Umile said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It got some momentum going, got the place moving, and I think from that point on we played pretty well.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Boston College head coach Jerry York agreed.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The faceoff goal early in the third period was a momentum changer,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d York said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something we spend a lot of time on, faceoffs, but we just lost the draw clean there and the kid had a good shot off the triangle set.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
With the win, New Hampshire improves their record to 16-10-7 (15-5-6 in Hockey East play) and Boston College falls to 20-10-3 (15-8-3). <\/p>\n
The two teams wrap up the regular season with a rematch tomorrow night at Boston College, and even though the game won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t count for much in the Hockey East standings, it will be huge in the PairWise rankings and could have implications in the NCAA tournament selection process.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a huge two points tomorrow for the NCAA tournament,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wildcats\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 forward Phil DeSimone said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re definitely not done yet; we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re kind of just starting.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Boston College forward Chris Kreider opened the scoring at 12:26 of the first period when he capitalized on a rebound after teammate Ben Smith took the puck wide of the net and drew New Hampshire goaltender Brian Foster out of his crease. Foster made an easy save on Smith but couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t control the rebound and Kreider put the Eagles up 1-0. The play was reviewed, but the call was upheld.<\/p>\n
The referees called for another long review to approve Boston College\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s second goal.<\/p>\n
When the Eagles scored on a rocket one-timer from senior forward Matt Lombardi at 4:15 of the second period, one referee blew his whistle right as Lombardi released the shot due to a delayed penalty on Wildcats\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 forward Paul Thompson. <\/p>\n
It was unclear why the referee had blown the play dead, since no New Hampshire played had touched the puck, but the officials cleared up the confusion and determined that Lombardi had scored to give his Eagles a 2-0 lead.<\/p>\n
Sophomore defenseman Tommy Cross added another goal from the point a few minutes later to put Boston College up 3-0, and the tense New Hampshire crowd fell silent.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I thought our team played extremely well for 55 of the 65 minutes that we played,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d York said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153But I thought we got back on our heels for about 10 or 12 minutes of the third period, starting right with the faceoff goal. We rallied and came back pretty hard, I thought, late in the game and in the OT, but we just absolutely stopped skating and started watching the Wildcats.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Tomorrow night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rematch at Conte Forum in Chesnutt Hill, Mass. starts at 7 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A tie never felt so good. New Hampshire stormed all the way back from a three goal deficit in the third period to tie No. 5 Boston College, 3-3, and claim the Hockey East regular season title outright in front of their home crowd at the Whittemore Center in Durham, N.H. on Friday night. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10311"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10311\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10311"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wwwproxy.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}