ECH “Out East” A Trip North- Alfond as Advertised
By Brendan Locke — January 11, 2024
The range of Hockey East schools spans six states. Some are steps off a T stop in Boston, in a bustling suburb, in the heart of an old mill town, or a short trip south or west of the hub.
Orono, Maine is not one of those places.
Sitting quietly next to its bigger sibling Bangor, a sleepy town in the woods of Maine, it’s not an easy place to get to.
Dysarts Truck Stops are the only thing open past 9:00 PM and the tail end of the Appalachian Mountains frame the pines that line the roads.
But it is well worth the trip.
The people there love their Black Bears.
I had never been to Orono previous to this trip, and when you get that far into the heart of the state, you don’t pass a lot of cars on the highway.
Until you get to the Orono exit on gameday.
Backed up to the highway 2 hours before the game, it’s a scene befitting of an SEC football game, not a regular season hockey game in January.
As I was driving up to the game, I was thinking about how disappointing it was that this game between the defending national champions and a surging top-10 team could come up short. There were no students on campus, and players from both sides represented their country at the World Junior Championships. Denver’s head coach, Dave Carle, was also representing the United States in Ottawa, which, of course, led to a second straight gold medal (shocker).
I was wrong.
Alfond Arena was over capacity and delivered everything you could want from a venue.
At various Hockey East venues, there are different “vibes”.
At some, people are more interested in going out after the game than the action on the ice,
At others, it’s the just the student section to make noise while others sit and watch quietly,
Some are too big and feel cavernous, some don’t even know they have one of the best teams in the country on their own campus.
But not at The Alfond.
The people are there to watch hockey, to support the team that represents their state. They are not concerned with anything other than the outcome of the game and the impact that they have on that outcome.
And when the defending national champs came to town, and ESPN was in the building, “The Alf” was at its best.
Game 1
With a nearly capacity crowd for warmups, this did not feel like a January game.
Worth mentioning, that these teams both were coming off their worst loss imaginable out of the break. With Denver losing to… well you know by now. And Maine, dropped a game in Portland to Bentley earlier that week.
Denver looked up to the task to quite the crowd, keeping Maine hemmed in their own end throughout much of the 1st period and forced Maine goalie Albin Boija to make a crucial breakaway stop to deny DU forward Aidan Thompson in the dying minutes of the opening 20.
The domination would continue in the 2nd, as Talyor Makar (yes that Makar) would make a massive mistake with a hit from behind while on the penalty kill and the Pioneers would have a 5 on 3 and it wouldn’t take long for Denver to capitalize.
Denver looked like the best team in the country at this point, the Black Bears would have flashes or shifts where they looked the part, but hanging on due to one of the best goalies in the nation in Boija making multiple massive stops.
Then everything changed, Ross Mitton the Graduate transfer from Colgate, led a shift for the Black Bears that led to nearly 3 minutes of zone time. The crowd rose to its feet and suddenly everything switched.
Maine completely took it to Denver for the remainder of the period, however, and stop me if you have heard this before, could not solve Matt Davis.
Davis was brilliant in both games and if anybody was concerned about that game against UNLV, don’t be, he’s fine.
But Maine would eventually get on the board, a powerplay in the late stages of the 2nd set the scene for maybe not the prettiest but effective goal for the Black Bears.
The 3rd period matched the same energy that the back half of the 2nd did, with complete domination from Maine. The constant pressure from the Black Bears caused the defending national champs to struggle to get out of their own zone at times. But unable to break through, they let the Pio’s hang around.
The building was shaking before a Denver offensive zone faceoff, in a 1-1 game with 30 seconds remaining. But it would quickly fall silent.
A shocking goal from the Pios, but that is what the elite teams do when they don’t have their A-game, they find a way to win.
Maine has struggled with that all season, they fell apart in the final 10 minutes at BC, and the following weekend they gave up a goal with 20 seconds to go against BU. If the Black Bears want to make a deep run in Hockey East and have a chance at a national championship, they need to be able to close out games.
Game 2
This was more than a game for Maine, the building was somehow louder than game 1, and with Maine’s all-time leading scorer, former national championship-winning coach, and current head coach of the St. Louis Blues, Jim Montgomery welcoming the crowd over a hype video as the players took the ice. The roof was about to blow off the building.
“That was one of those games, after last night, that could go one way or another, and it went the right way as far as the reaction and the response to it,” Maine coach Ben Barr mentioned after the game.
From the word go, this game was all Maine, it felt like there may have been a curse on the Black Bears, despite complete domination, outshooting the Pioneers by a margin of almost 4-1. They could not break through “Mount Davis”.
Then Denver did Denver things,
Completely against the run of play, I can only imagine what was going through the mind of Ben Barr, as the seconds ticked down to end the opening 20 his team played as good as he could ask for, yet they trailed on the scoreboard. Until…
With 2 seconds left in the period, somehow, the Black Bears had broken through. The score level was at 1 and the weight seemed to be lifted off everyone in a white jersey's shoulders.
The biggest difference between game 1 and game 2 was that these looked like they wanted to run each other into the ground in game 2, there were 9 penalties called in game 2 compared to just 3 in game 1.
It did not bother Barr “It’s because we stopped at the net front, last night we would just skate by. When you stop at the net front and look for rebounds those types of things happen more… Our composure in those moments was really good”
The total was 4 powerplays for Maine to Denver’s 1 and the rest were matching calls.
A scoreless second period was much of the same, as the Black Bears tallied another 20 shots on net in the period, but could not get another past Davis. As for the issue of frustration getting the better of Maine? It was the leaders who stepped up “They were messaging it (doing the right things and creating chances) it comes from them. We can say everything we want… but for us to go to that next level those guys are the ones who are doing it.”
Well, the words of encouragement from the bench finally paid off because, for the first time since before the December break, Maine had a lead.
As expected, a late push came from the Pioneers but to no avail, Boija was brilliant. In both games, the goalies stole the show and were the best players on their teams. Davis by volume, and Boija was sharp when he needed to be.
Denver could not find an equalizer, and Maine would hang on to an emotional win, it felt like a little bit more than a game in January according to David Breazeale “We had something to prove tonight, we proved it to ourselves, and to this awesome state that follows us”
Breazeale didn’t need to mention that last part, he could have just said we proved we can play with anybody and win against the best teams in the country.
But he didn’t.
He knows what hockey means to Maine and what the Black Bears mean to the state.
Without any high-level professional sports, Black Bear hockey is the beginning, middle, and end of sports fandom in the state.
This year, they’ve got a good one.
