For the first time in more than two decades, Maine is back on top of Hockey East. The Black Bears beat UConn 5-2 in Friday night’s conference championship game at TD Garden to capture their first Hockey East tournament title since 2004.
Once upon a time, this was the norm. In Hockey East’s first 20 years, from 1984-2004, Maine appeared in the championship game 12 times and won five of them. The next 20 years featured a slow slide down the standings before finally clawing back under head coach Ben Barr over the last four years.
The program has endured tragedy – the death of legendary coach Shawn Walsh at the age of 46 in 2001 following a battle with cancer, and the unexpected death of coach Red Gendron in April 2021.
There were losing seasons – 10 of them in 16 years from 2007-23. There was a 12-year gap without an NCAA tournament appearance from 2012-24, something that would have seemed unthinkable after making the tournament 16 times in 21 years from 1986-2007.
The one year they appeared to be on their way – 2019-20, when they had Jeremy Swayman in net – the season got cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. That 2011-12 season also marked Maine’s last appearance in the Hockey East championship game before Friday.
The turnaround did not start immediately under Barr, who took over following Gendron’s death. The Black Bears went 7-22-4 in his first season in 2021-22 and finished last in Hockey East. They improved to 15-16-5 in 2022-23 – another losing season and another year out of NCAAs, but a clear step forward.
The big breakthrough came last year, when Maine went 23-12-2 to finish third in Hockey East. They returned to TD Garden for the Hockey East semifinals for the first time in 12 years and finally got back to the NCAA tournament, where they lost to Cornell in the first round.
This Black Bears team was determined to prove that last year was no fluke right from the get-go. They got off to a 6-0-1 start and remained near the top of the Hockey East standings and the national rankings all season.
They smoked UMass Lowell, 7-1, in the Hockey East quarterfinals. Then they outlasted Northeastern, 4-3, in a double-overtime thriller in Thursday’s semifinal.
If there were any tired legs, the Black Bears didn’t show them. They outshot UConn 11-8 in the first period Friday night and took a 2-0 lead into the intermission.
Graduate captain Lynden Breen, who missed 16 games this season due to injury, opened the scoring 12:47 into the game when he took off on a 2-on-1 and beat UConn goalie Tyler Muszelik five-hole. It was only fitting that such a big goal came from Breen, who is in his fifth year with the program and is the only player left who played for Gendron.
Josh Nadeau made it 2-0 less than four minutes later on the power play, going coast-to-coast and darting right through the UConn penalty kill before snapping a shot past Muszelik.
The Huskies pushed back to start the second period, hemming Maine in and landing four straight shots on goal to open the frame. Barr smartly used his timeout to settle his Black Bears down, and they responded. Maine started to take control again, and Harrison Scott, who transferred in from Bentley last year, extended the lead to 3-0 late in the period when he batted in a loose puck in the slot.
UConn finally got on the board with a Tabor Heaslip goal early in the third, but then Taylor Makar, another transfer who came in from UMass this season (and the younger brother of Cale), made it 4-1 Maine with a snipe off the rush.
UConn appeared to cut it to 4-2 with 8:53 remaining, but Maine successfully challenged for offsides. The Huskies eventually did make it a two-goal game again when Heaslip scored his second of the night with 5:19 remaining, but it was too little too late.
Makar sealed the title with a late empty-netter, his second goal of the game, and the party was on. The decidedly pro-Maine crowd at TD Garden rose to a crescendo as the clock ticked down. One of college hockey’s most devoted fanbases finally had a sixth Hockey East championship to celebrate.
The win locks the Black Bears in as one of the four one-seeds in the NCAA tournament, which begins on Thursday. They will go to either Allentown, Pa. or Fargo, N.D. depending on how other conference tournaments play out Friday and Saturday.
UConn, meanwhile, was already a lock to make its first-ever NCAA tournament. The Huskies will be a two-seed, and could potentially end up in the same regional as Maine in Allentown.
Hockey East will have six teams total in the 16-team NCAA field, tied for the most in conference history. In addition to Maine and UConn, the league will also have Boston College, Boston University, Providence and UMass going. BC is locked in as the No. 1 overall seed despite getting upset by Northeastern in the Hockey East quarterfinals.