These are the three things I think I learned this week.
1. BC ain’t dead yet.
After falling out of the national polls for the first time since February 23, 2009–(that stat from Jim Connelly’s column last week–the Eagles rebounded with a sweep of Merrimack.
Hey, it’s not like they toppled the number one team in the country. Merrimack is now 1-6-2. And it’s not like they dominated the Warriors. Aside from an empty-netter with eight seconds left on Friday, both games were 2-1 squeakers.
But when you go into a weekend 1-5-1, you can’t be picky. You take the wins and move onward and hopefully, upward.
2. Lowell may not be dead, but the emergency monitors are flashing red and blasting all alarms.
Arguably, the biggest negative surprise of the early season was when the River Hawks opened with three losses. They’d been picked to finish second in the league, nipping on the heels of Boston University. Getting swept by (then) lowly regarded New Hampshire was a stunner.
But when Lowell won the back end of a weekend series with Omaha and then travelled to the North Country and took both games from Clarkson and St. Lawrence, and by a collective margin of 8-1, all appeared well.
These were the River Hawks we’d come to respect over the past few years.
A week ago, however, they were swept by Northeastern, then this weekend they managed only a split when hosting Maine.
In the insightful words of Scooby-doo, “Ruh-roh.”
3. Perhaps this was a good week for no non-conference games.
Jim has documented Hockey East’s poor play out of conference, but didn’t kick the league teams again when they were down a week ago. But fact is, a week ago they took a sub-par non-conference record and made it worse, losing all six games.
So it was a relief to see 100 percent league action this week.
