By: Alex Faust, News Staff

Win or lose, Monday’s Beanpot final was perhaps the most exciting college hockey game I’ve ever seen. Plenty of Northeastern fans I spoke with echoed the same sentiment, but with one admonition: Losing still hurts, since the Huskies were able to keep pace with the best team in the nation for more than 60 minutes. Never mind the “we played hard, better luck next time” excuse that we’re supposed to accept – it was a game within reach.

But in the end, there are two reasons why you can’t be too upset with the outcome:

First (and this may sound a bit childish) – at least it wasn’t BU. As silly as that may sound, can you honestly tell me that you would feel the same had the Terriers beaten the Huskies 7-6 in overtime?

Second – Northeastern left it all on the ice. It’s the hardest I’ve seen this Huskies team play in a long time, and they literally ran out of steam in overtime. The team looked gassed at the end of the second period, but managed to kick it into another gear for the third. Asking anything more in overtime was a bit too much, and inevitably the athleticism and skill of Boston College won out.

Additionally, as much as the game was within the Huskies’ grasp, there were no fluky moments, no strange plays down the stretch. The best team in the nation won the game, and you can’t be angry at a Huskies team that forced BC to score seven goals (with the last one in overtime) to get the win.

What does make Monday’s loss intriguing is that these two teams will meet again this weekend, but in their respective home arenas. All of the matchups that Jared Shafran wrote about last week are still the same – goalies John Muse vs. Chris Rawlings, the Huskies’ power play vs. the Eagles’ penalty kill, the list goes on. But instead of a Beanpot trophy, there are Hockey East points on the line.

Not since the Hockey East era began can you find an instance in which the Beanpot championship matchup was repeated in league play the following weekend. Remember, Northeastern played BU in every previous trip to the final dating back to 1984. Flipping back through old NU, BC and BU media guides, you usually see a late-season matchup between the Huskies and Terriers, and by the time the Beanpot rolls around, BU and BC have exhausted their regular-season league games. It’s no coincidence that the schedule is made to avoid such meetings, but we’ll get our first taste of it this weekend.

We’ll also know very early on Friday whether Northeastern has recovered from the emotional (and physical) low of losing the Beanpot in overtime. If we see the same intense play out of the Huskies on Friday that we saw at the Garden on Monday, it might be another toss-up. But if Northeastern gets scored on multiple times early without answering, it could be an ugly weekend.

In all likelihood, this weekend’s series won’t top what we saw on Monday. It was a spectacular display that reminds us why the Beanpot is so special, even if our boys haven’t won the damn thing in 23 years. The emotion and intensity just won’t be the same, and we might have to wait until next year’s tournament to see something like that again.