So with that, the once promising UMass hockey season has come to an end.
The last two nights at the very least, revealed some heart and effort. The sad reality is B.C. is one of the best teams in the country, and beating them is going to be tough for any team. What stings is, if this team showed this type of determination and grit in the month of February, they would never have been playing the Eagles in the quarterfinals. At worst they’d have drawn them in the single elimination semi-finals or finals, which would have been much more favorable.
There will be time for a post-mortem later in the week, and I plan on doing that. But what’s dissappointing now (and it was mentioned at Fear the Triangle), is that just of a month ago, this team was closer to landing a number one seed in the NCAA tournament (and were a 2 seed in plenty of USCHO bracketologies) than they were to not being in the tourney at all. In the end, they didn’t get home ice in their own conference tourney (which they almost didn’t make!) and became the only team in the first round to get swept (see, my reverse jinx didn’t work at all…it was like a reverse reverse jinx…UMass gets swept, every other series goes to three games).
There is plenty of blame to go around, but that’s for later in the week. Instead, I want to thank Justin Braun, Brett Watson, Martin Nolet, Dan Meyers and Will Ortiz for getting to watch them over the last four years. Not the way I wanted to see them go out, but I’m happy to have had the pleausre of watching them play. And I don’t even want to think about what their sub-par defense is going to look like next year without them, yeeeeesh.
