This is what all the hype was about on both sides of the border. This is how Boston University’s hockey team, which couldn’t win for losing last year, got its swagger back before the season was five games old. Jack Eichel is the best freshman the Terriers ever have had and arguably the best player in the country. And on Saturday night at TD Garden he carried his scarlet-clad mates to their first Hockey East crown in six years and put them on a road that leads back to Causeway Street, where the big trophy will be handed out next month.
“He says things may happen because of luck but I’m starting not to believe it,” coach David Quinn said after the top-seeded Terriers dethroned UMass-Lowell, 5-3, in the title match. “I think it happens because he wants it to happen.”
All Eichel did was make a seeing-eye pass across the ice to captain Matt Grzelcyk for a tap-in goal, then walked in himself two minutes later and slipped the puck through goaltender Kevin Boyle’s five-hole. Two NHL-style moves, two goals, and the River Hawks were chasing the game for the rest of the night.
Rivals who were skating away from the Terriers last season have been chasing them all year and observers who watched BU run the table in 2009 are thinking that they just might do it again. “There are some similarities up to this point,” mused Quinn. “We’ve got karma. We’ve done a great job being a team. We have great leadership, great goaltending. Our D-corps is very good.”
And the Terriers score. Maybe not as much as the 2009 bunch, but they can put four or five pucks past you on a given night. This is the team that Quinn and his assistants thought they might have last summer, when they welcomed back a small group of hardened veterans who’d been through a humbling grind of a campaign plus nine talented freshmen who didn’t know what it was like to miss the national tournament or finish last in the Beanpot.
“We knew we’d be a much better hockey team,” said Quinn, whose group has won 25 games. “How much better, I didn’t know. What our record was going to be, I didn’t know.”
But after the Terriers went unbeaten in October, Quinn and his staff began thinking about April. “We felt if things went well we might have a chance to win the national title,” he said. “I know that may have sounded absurd when you saw what happened last year but we really felt that and we told the team that.”
By midwinter there was little doubt that BU was going to be back in the NCAAs after a three-year absence, almost certainly as a No. 1 seed. But after 21 losses last year, this season has been about re-establishing the brand, about letting the college hockey world know that the Terriers were out of the doghouse and snapping and snarling again.
That was best done by reclaiming the trophies that had defined the program. BU hadn’t won the Beanpot since 2009. They did it this February. They hadn’t won the Hockey East regular-season title since 2009. They did it this month. And the Terriers hadn’t skated around the Garden ice with the tournament trophy since 2009, when they blanked UML to do it.
“It’s awesome,” declared Grzelcyk, after he and his confreres had hoisted the trophy. “Coming to BU it’s something that you definitely expect and the past few years we haven’t been able to achieve it.
So it was fitting that the River Hawks once again were the final barrier and that they came in as champions. Desperate champions, even. If Lowell lost to BU they would have to give up their sticks and everyone knew that. So it was vital that BU get up and stay up and it was Eichel who lifted them with two brilliant plays that put his mates up, 2-0, in the first period.
On the first one, he cruised through a succession of blue jerseys, spotted his captain on the other side, and spoon-fed him. “The goal was all Jack,” Grzelcyk said.
On the second, Eichel coolly made his way to the goalmouth where a scrum awaited and did a magic stick trick that lit the lamp before anyone knew that the puck had crossed the line.
Then, as the third period was ticking down and UML had closed to 4-2, Eichel strolled in again for another five-holer. That’s what the NHL’s Central Scouting Bureau saw last year. Eichel may only have been 18 but he was ready to be the difference-maker.
“I don’t know if people really appreciate it because he does make it look so easy,” said Quinn. “He’s so fluid. I kind of joke with him that he’s like a Secretariat of a hockey player. He just looks so different from all the other horses. He’s very much in that mold.”
Secretariat won the Triple Crown all by himself. Eichel has a bunch of stablemates who make sure he doesn’t have to do all the work.
“They’ve made it easy on me,” he said.
From here it gets harder for all of them. The road ahead is unfamiliar to what is the youngest team in the land but the Terriers have a thoroughbred who can go the distance for them. Eichel may only be on Commonwealth Avenue for a year before the pros come calling, but it’s already been one for the books.
John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.