BOSTON — For a split second, Boston University freshman forward Quinn Hutson didn’t know if he could trust what his eyes were telling him.
“It was pretty crazy,” Hutson said. “I saw it go in, it was kind of slow motion. I wasn’t sure, then everyone was celebrating.”
Hutson’s goal at 10:52 of overtime gave Boston University a 2-1 win over Providence in the Hockey East semifinals Friday night at TD Garden, sending the Terriers to the conference championship game for the 13th time in school history and first since 2018.
Hutson, skating hard down the center of the ice toward the Providence net, took a near-perfect centering feed from left wing Luke Tuch and poked it past Friars goalie Philip Svedebäck to set off the celebration.
“I just went back door,” Hutson said. “‘Tuchy’ was right there to make the play.”
BU (26-10-0, 20-6-0 Hockey East), ranked No. 5 in the USCHO.com men’s D-I poll, will play in the NCAA tournament regardless of how it does in Saturday’s championship game vs. either UMass-Lowell or Merrimack. However, after a humbling fourth-place finish in the Beanpot one month earlier on the same TD Garden ice, the Terriers came into this tournament hoping to erase that memory.
“We didn’t play well during the Beanpot and I think that stuck with our guys,” said first-year BU coach Jay Pandolfo. “Coming into this game today, it was desperation for us.”
It was a bitter loss for Providence (16-14-7, 11-10-6), which needed to win the association championship to punch its ticket to the NCAA tournament. Particularly frustrating for the Friars was the fact that they outshot BU by a 34-15 margin in regulation, only to have the opposite happen to them in overtime (10-4 BU advantage).
“The guys kept working, they kept battling,” Providence coach Nate Leaman said. “I thought we were doing a pretty good job. I thought our start (in overtime) was good. We took a stick penalty there and that kind of changed our momentum.”
The Friars had nothing to show for their dominance, however, until freshman forward Bennett Schimeck broke a scoreless deadlock with his 11th of the season at 12:25 of the third period.
Shimeck went 5-hole on Commesso — in a manner of speaking — when his shot from the right wing ricocheted off the inside of Commesso’s right knee and into the back of the net to give Providence a 1-0 lead.
Providence’s lead was short lived, however, as BU’s Dylan Peterson connected for his fifth of the year at 17:28 to tie the game 1-1. Peterson positioned himself high in the slot to take a pass from Lane Hutson from the left face-off circle and redirected off the stick of Ryan Greene and punched it to the left of Svedebäck for the equalizer.
A scary moment occurred with 12:05 to go in the third when an awkward collision between BU’s Case McCarthy and Providence’s Patrick Moynihan sent McCarthy into the boards back first behind the Friars’ net. McCarthy was tended to by athletic trainers, eventually got up on his skates to loud applause, and was taken off ice on a stretcher. Pandolfo reported McCarthy was taken to the hospital and was under evaluation as of Friday evening.
