ANATOMY OF A GAME-WINNER: Boston College Hockey Reclaims The Beanpot In A 1-0 Instant Classic Over Boston University

Wow.

Is anyone else's heart rate still elevated after last night's wild and crazy game? By now, you all know what happened. But we'll go through the motions anyway.

Early on it looked like BC might win by 6 or 7. The Eagles took 12 of the game's first 13 shots and kept coming at the Terriers in waves, until finally BU was granted a reprieve thanks to a bizarre power outage that lasted a half hour and sent the teams back to the locker rooms for a short stretch.

But despite BC literally shooting the lights out, they came away with nothing to show for it, and The Terriers found their legs. The rest of regulation featured a much closer battle on the shot chart, and while BC did have most of the good chances, BU's Sean Maguire's goaltending was equal to the task.

60 minutes in, the game had featured just about everything, from a near-brawl including a punch to the jaw from BU's Jordan Greenway, two separate incidents with Terriers bowling over Thatcher Demko, and some of the best team defense you will ever see in a hockey game...

Everything, of course, except a goal.

Boston College Goal #1: 1:57 of Overtime
Alex Tuch (Zach Sanford, Steve Santini)

BC 1, BU 0 -- FINAL

It all starts and ends with Alex Tuch.

The puck is in BU's end and it's Tuch pressuring BU, and the Terriers have to chip it out without getting to set up much of a breakout. On its way out, Doherty gets a little hip check on the Terrier going to retrieve the puck and it disrupts him enough so that Santini doesn't face the same pressure that BU did in their own end.

That extra second is what makes the difference, otherwise Santini probably just has to play it safe and dump it out, too. Instead, he has that time to look up ice and find Sanford in the neutral zone to get the puck moving in the right direction.

Sanford pushes it ahead to Tuch, and at this point even though it's early in the overtime, you can tell that the players are already a little sluggish from having to play beyond 60 minutes. BU is up on the blue line, but their feet aren't really moving. Tuch pulls it back and figures he'll just have a go on net.

Even though he's up high, he still makes it a good play by sliding over to give himself a full frontal angle on the net. That's not enough to get him the goal, but the screen out front takes away just that split second extra for Maguire, and those two factors send the puck whipping around the back of the net and sending the BC end of the balcony into cacophony.

It was just the kind of play you're taught to make in a long overtime -- just get the puck to the net.

What an exciting game. After a whole season without any hardware, it's nice to start putting things in their rightful place in the trophy case.

BC is no doubt dinged up, but fortunately Merrimack, sitting only above lowly UMass in the Hockey East standings, is up next for a home and home. It wouldn't surprise me to see a couple Eagles (specifically Eagles whose names rhyme with Catcher Hem Co.) take a breather in one of those games, but after BC's big 2nd half climb in the Pairwise, this is no time for the Eagles to come up with a letdown came.