Boston College Hockey Eliminated From Hockey East Tournament

There haven't been many BC hockey weekends as disappointing as this one of late. After the women were eliminated in the NCAA quarterfinals yesterday, the men followed suit tonight, falling in the Hockey East quarterfinals to Notre Dame by a score of 4-2.

Early on it looked like BC might be able to control the game from the beginning. Four minutes in, Adam Gilmour intercepted a failed clearing attempt from Notre Dame and walked in on Summerhays. One little move got Summerhays to bite hard, and Gilmour dished to Kevin Hayes who had a wide open net to shoot on.

That was a bad omen all series, though, as the first team to score had lost both of the first two games. And Notre Dame would answer. Stephen Johns came in over the blue line and backhanded a harmless shot from a bad angle in on Thatcher Demko and the puck managed to trickle its way through. It was a real soft goal for Demko and was a sign that this might not be our night.

Notre Dame took its first lead early in the second period. A blocked initial shot found its way over to Bryan Rust at the faceoff circle. Demko had no idea where the puck was and Rust was able to shoot the puck on a wide open net.

BC was able to tie it up this time. Patrick Brown scored a power play goal 4 minutes later to make it 2-2, and BC had to be feeling good.

That is, until Rust scored a goal off several nice Notre Dame passes on a rush into the zone with just 4 seconds left in the period. That would turn out to be the game winner, despite a third period featuring a barrage of BC shots and several chances that just didn't find the back of the net. The Irish iced it with 2 minutes left on a semi-breakaway for Jeff Costello and that was that.

The worst part of the loss is that there is no BC hockey for two weeks. The women's team had their season end and the men will have to sit and wait until selection Sunday to find out who they will play in the quarterfinals. It looks like regardless of how the other tournaments shake out, BC will be the #2 overall seed in Worcester.

BC didn't play too badly tonight, although I'm sure Demko would like to have one or two of the goals back. Also, Gaudreau's point streak ended at 31 games, but it'll be kind of nice to get that monkey off his back. You kind of got the feeling late in the streak that if he didn't have a point going into the third period, that the players would be trying to force the puck to him a bit more than that should have.

So now we wait. Hopefully BC doesn't get rusty in the next two weeks before their next game or they could be looking at an early exit from the tournament. We'll have full coverage of the selection show next week as well as some other hockey talk as week progresses.