If You Are From Here, You Get It

By Brendan Locke — February 10th, 2025

Photo via Northeastern Athletics

Last Monday, Boston College forward Teddy Stiga picked up the puck in the neutral zone at TD Garden. The forward with a left-handed shot screamed into the Northeastern zone, cut onto his forehand, and fired a laser over Cameron Whitehead’s shoulder just 46 seconds into his first game at the Beanpot.

The Sudbury, Massachusetts native played prep school hockey at Belmont Hill, less than 10 miles from the front door at TD Garden. He operated in relative anonymity in the first half of the season at BC. Despite being a 2nd round draft choice of the Nashville Predators and being a product of the vaunted national development program.

That was until he scored the game-winning goal in overtime of the gold medal game in the Under-20 World Championships back in early January.

Stiga etched his name in stone in American hockey history that night in Ottawa. Since then, he has exploded for top-ranked Eagles. In the 10 games since the calendar flipped to 2025, Stiga has 12 points.

But it was what he accomplished at TD Garden on the first Monday in February that stood out. Every kid who plays hockey in Massachusetts dreams of playing in the Beanpot. Skating on that ice with those student sections, this is a uniquely Boston event, it’s something that we have that other parts of the country don’t.

Stiga was quick to brush off most praise after the game, but was still aware of the moment.

“It was a dream come true.”

The Beanpot stands for more than just some games in February. It’s a gathering place, somewhere to see old coaches and parents who would drive you to the rink as a mite or squirt. It’s the ice we in Massachusetts dreamed of playing on the most.

It’s the highlight of the year for students and alumni alike.

“I graduated Northeastern in 1988, I go every year.” Said one Huskie fan, “[I] haven’t missed one since ‘85, that was my freshman year, we beat BU my freshman year, and I said this is great, I’m going to go every year. And I have, now I’ve gotten to take my sons and daughter in, it’s the highlight of our winter.” As he made his way through the Garden for the umpteenth time, however, for him it was a long road.

“When they won in ‘88 it felt like we were going to go on a run a maybe start something, but it didn’t work out that way, but when they won for the first time in 30 years (2018) it was as good as the Sox in ‘04, I couldn’t believe I saw them actually win it again, and now they are on a run!”

If you are from Massachusetts, what does the Beanpot mean?

“Everything,” according to one Northeastern student

“Growing up playing youth hockey around Boston, this is our Super Bowl,” said another

“As a fan and student, I’d rather be in the crowd for this than a Hockey East championship. Would I rather beat BC in the championship here, or Merrimack or Lowell in Hockey East? Come on.” A BU student quipped

 However, the lasting impact of this Beanpot is in the uniqueness and the tight-knit community of the hockey world, especially in Massachusetts.

“We saw some of the guys from (removed) high, we play them every year and don’t like them too much. They actually beat us twice this year, so we can’t really say much, though. But maybe we can meet them here at the Garden, that’d be cool.” One captain of his high school hockey team mentioned.

The Massachusetts High School hockey tournament culminates on the third Sunday in March at TD Garden. There was once a day when kids at various Massachusetts schools would jump from playing at the Garden for a state championship to playing for a Beanpot a year later. That day has since passed, and the landscape has changed, but for some, it’s still a highlight.

Matt Filipe grew up in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, and played his high school hockey at Malden Catholic, which at the time was on an unprecedented run of state championships. The Lancers made it to the Super 8 championship game at the Garden six years in a row from 2011-2016, winning five of the six available titles. Filipe was drafted in the third round by the Carolina Hurricanes and played for Northeastern from 2016 to 2020. He just stepped away from the game after a four-year professional career.

Filipe headlined those teams at Malden Catholic with a bolstered star star-studded roster of players going on the play at various Hockey East schools. While most kids were dreaming of playing for BC or BU, for Filipe, there was only one choice: “My dad played at Northeastern, he graduated in ‘82, I grew up going to Northeastern games, we used to go into Matthews arena every Friday, Saturday… Our Lynnfield youth hockey team used to play in between periods at Northeastern.”

By the time he was at Northeastern, he had skated on the ice at the Garden three times, winning a state title twice.

“Anytime you step on the ice at the Garden, it’s pretty special… I remember getting chills walking out, getting the police escort from Matthews.”

Filipe’s sophomore year, he got to live out a dream, and the Huskies got to throw away 30 years of torment down the drain when the Huskies finally won it all in 2018.

“We had the best line in the country that year,” Filipe said. “[Adam] Gaudette won the Hobey [Baker Award], it was unbelievable.”

But according to Filipe, that wasn’t even his favorite.

“We were overlooked my junior year, it was the most wins in Northeastern hockey history, we lost that Gaudette with [Dylan] Sikura and [Nolan] Stevens line. We lost them all at once, that Beanpot was really really. That was my favorite one… It cemented into Northeastern, we’re here and we’re here to stay. It wasn’t a fluke, to not win for 30 years and go back to back, it wasn’t just a one off.”

Filipe also mentioned that after winning it’s particularly difficult to get back to work that week… “the coaches try their best all they can but you just want to go party, especially my junior-senior year we really had the locker room well and we just partied… then we had to drive up to Vermont”

Seems like a scheduling “faux pas” to send any of the Beanpot schools to Vermont after the Beanpot, but evidently not, the Huskies would end up sweeping the series with the Catamounts.

Photo Via Northeastern Hockey Blog

The lasting memories that the Beanpot creates can last generations, one older BU fan mentioned, “I still think about the ‘78 BU team all the time, people think about Silk and O’Callahan playing for the Olympic team against the Soviets. I think of when I watched them knock off Harvard after the blizzard of ‘78.”

More on the blizzard of ‘78 later.

For others, it’s the BU team in ‘91, McEachern, Amonte, Sacco, and Tkachuk all from within miles of Boston, living out a lifelong dream to win at the Garden, and win at the Beanpot. It’s BC in ‘11, the Whitney and Hayes brothers, Muse, Kreider, and Atkinson. Or maybe it’s Harvard in ‘89 with MacDonald, and the Donatos.

Photo Via Boston Globe/Getty images

When a tradition carries weight, it carries the stories that are passed down. Why does the Beanpot work here and not in other places? We’ve been doing it here for 70 years, and it doesn’t need an explanation. It’s more than any one player, one student, or one coach. It’s been the same four teams, without a break for war or snowstorm or anything in between.

The memories that last a lifetime in the Garden, new or old, still carry on. Sports broadcaster Sean McDonough shared a story for ages. His father, the late Will McDonough, the legendary sportswriter for the Boston Globe, covered football for the most part, being the first print journalist to venture into TV, working for CBS in the late 1980s.

But he always covered the Beanpot, and according to Sean, there’s one that he will never forget.

“I was at the Beanpot during the infamous blizzard of ‘78 with two buddies of mine from high school.” McDonough shared via text, “when the lights in the Garden started blinking on and off, and they made an announcement about the roads being closed and the T [subway] being stopped. My dad [Will] signaled from the press box for the three of us to meet him at the press room. He told us we were going to go to the Boston Globe [Office/printing building]. We would basically end up pushing his car down a deserted expressway with abandoned cars all over the place. We were stuck in the Globe sports department for several days before we could finally go home. I love the Beanpot.” McDonough was not the only one that night to get stuck in the blizzard of ‘78. Over 200 people had to sleep in the Garden that infamous night while waiting to dig their car out of the snow, or for the trains to open back up.

McDonough would go on to do play-by-play for the Beanpot for 10 years, calling it a “highlight of his career” a man who has called Super Bowls, national championships, Stanley Cup Finals, a World Series winning walk-off homerun, Monday Night Football, and basically whatever other sport you can think of. This is the tournament, this is the event if you are from here. It’s only a highlight if you know what this event is.

McDonough also holds the distinction of being able to do something that no broadcaster can do today. He called a game in the old Boston Garden, demolished in 1995.

“Best place to call hockey. The broadcast position was in the first row of the balcony. It was so close you could often hear the players talking to each other or the officials.”

Another famous Boston broadcaster, Sean Grande, who is now the radio voice of the Boston Celtics, was covering the Beanpot for NESN in 1991. Grande mentioned in the build-up to the ‘91 final.

“Jack Parker doesn’t know who he’s playing on the second Monday in February, just what time.” Parker’s BU teams very rarely, if ever, played in the early time slot.

Former Terrier defenseman Pat Aufiero confirmed that “one of the things that Jack told us often was that we don’t play in consolation games.” Aufiero played for the Terriers from 1998-2002, winning three of four Beanpots in that span.

Aufiero grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts, and decided to play for his local high school, a team that had not won a league game in well over 30 years and was on the verge of folding the program. Aufiero took the program to new heights, and by the time he was a sophomore, he started getting letters from teams across Hockey East. Better players followed Aufiero into the high school, and by the time he was a junior, the team had a winning record for the first time in decades. But as the goal of playing college hockey became more realistic, so too came the allure of playing in the Beanpot “It came down to Maine and BU for me those were my final two… they [Maine] actually ended up winning the national title my freshman year” but the late Shawn Walsh could not get Aufiero to commit to living four hours north of home.

 “I did have conversations with Jack (Parker) around being a local kid and what it means to play so close to my hometown. Playing in Boston, at the Beanpot.” For Aufiero, it was a trip to the Garden to watch that made the choice easy.

“John [Messuri, head coach at Winchester] took me to the Beanpot, we had a contest in our practice at Winchester. It may have been a three on three or something, and John and Paul Krepelka [assistant] took us over there… I remember watching and how awesome it was to see the atmosphere in there and thinking to myself, I wanted to do that someday.”

Aufiero was invited to be part of the inaugural class at the national development program in Michigan. USA Hockey had opened up its camp in Plymouth, Michigan, for the best under-18-year-olds in the country. Aufiero fit the bill and thought about staying with his high school for his senior year or leaving for Michigan. He decided to head west and root for his team from afar as they went on to win a Division 1 state championship for the first time in 50 years.

But that meant that the Beanpot would be the first time stepping on the ice at the building known at the time as the FleetCenter.

“Before that time, I had played in a couple of different decent venues. Certainly, in high school, we had some great ones, some of those USHL random cities are pretty good. Actually, back then, we played in the OHL a little bit. It was the one and only year they did it because it was like a bloodbath every time we played them. Going to some of these Canadian cities, they would see the U.S.A. on the jersey, and the gloves would come off.”

But Aufiero’s freshman year was his favorite game in his tries at the Beanpot, “I remember being in the tunnel trying to sneak a look at all the people. And being in awe once you see it all of all the people that were there.”

That game, which BU won in overtime, happened to be Aufiero’s favorite too: “It’s definitely that one, it was the first one for me. And at the time, nobody was going to give us a sniff, BC was really good, and we were having a little bit of a down year that freshman year. BC was so good that year, the newness of it, being the underdog, and actually winning makes it my favorite.”

What Aufiero doesn’t tell you is that as an 18-year-old freshman, in overtime, he won a puck battle below his own goal line and snapped a pass up to the game-winning two-on-one. BU moved on to the championship game, knocking off Northeastern and winning the Beanpot again.

Between 1980 and 1995, BC had reached the Beanpot final just four times and won just once, in 1994. The Eagles had fallen on hard times by the early 90s and needed to revitalize the program. Everything changed in 1994, Jerry York returned to campus, and the former player stopped at his alma mater and made it his home.

Blake Bellefeuille was one of those early players to try to bring BC back. “They had just built Conte Forum, and Coach York had just gotten there… He didn’t give me any promises, he just told me he liked me as a player basically.”

Bellefeuille is the all-time leading point scorer in Framingham High School history and has his number retired in the legendary Loring Rink.

York eventually became known for his use of the term “trophy season,” which starts at the Beanpot and culminates with a national championship, which, often, is exactly what he did.

Bellefeuille knew what it meant to play in the Beanpot.

“It has a ton of history, the whole city is watching, Garden ice, you just have all these added pieces which make it more hyped than usual.”

Boston Globe/Getty Images

Unfortunately for York and Bellefeuille, the Eagles’ period of struggles on Monday nights in February continued until 2001, when the Eagles finally ended the rival Terriers’ streak of six Beanpots in a row. Bellefeuille had moved on to the professional ranks after graduating in 2000.

“You know, the Beanpot is really the start of T-shirt and hats season, and despite us not having a ton of success in the Beanpot. I think it prepped us really well, we played really well in Hockey East and made some great runs in the national tournament.”

BC made four consecutive Frozen Fours from 1998-2001, making the championship game three times, finally culminating in their first national championship since 1949 in 2001. “The building of it, and setting up the next class of players, and the Beanpot play a massive part in that.”

The Beanpot is Boston’s event. This is a collective in the state, the region, and its people. It’s a chance for little kids to dream, and bigger kids to live out their own. It’s where alumni gather and sieve chants echo down from the balcony, but it’s ours and we wouldn’t change a thing.

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