Thanks Chuck we are very excited...! The chant was FU (insert term that rhymes with truck) BU. I mean, I've said the word myself (on occasion, ya know??) just think 'sucks to BU' is a better UNH hockey cheer. I mean, it was deafening. We get the 'no hardware' chant when we are in Maine, the BC goalie chant is punishing and effective...but I just don't like that kind of thing. Anyway...not much one can do about it I guess..As per BB, it was just the intro but got the crowd going.
True story ... the first Beanpot I attended as a kid was the 1979 Beanpot Final, the year after the Blizzard of 1978 blew in on the night of the opening round games IIRC. Anyway, me and a few HS friends went to see the second night, which featured the somewhat
de rigueur BC vs. BU Beanpot Final (somethings don't change much, I guess). It was the second of four very memorable games I attended at the Boston Garden in what was a stretch of little over a year, which had begun on 12/7/78 when I saw my first live Detroit Red Wings game in a high-scoring and entertaining loss to the B's, where I sat next to the DRW bench/runway and chatted with my goaltending idol Rogie Vachon (who had a night off behind Jim Rutherford), while Errol Thompson notched the hat trick in a losing cause. The first visit of the Beanpot Finals referenced above came roughly two months later, and would be followed just over another month later by the 1979 ECAC Tourney Final between UNH and Dartmouth (my first in-person UNH game, and what a way to start!), and then culminating in the 1980 Beanpot Final little less than a year later, when Wayne Turner scored in OT to beat BC and give Northeastern its first-ever Beanpot title.
So enough for the intro ... to the bunch of us, who were HS seniors and figuring out where we were going to school the next year, this was kind of an intro to what college life was going to be like.
Animal House had been released the previous summer, and later in the Fall of 1978 my same group of friends traveled to the campus of Brandeis to see Jim Bouton speak, in the aftermath of his MLB comeback earlier that year, and pimping the re-release of his seminal book
Ball Four. Walking into the Garden, I definitely was struck by the electric atmosphere of the college crowd, two bands going pretty much non-stop, one after the other, and it was definitely a notch or two above what the B's-DRW crowd had been a few weeks earlier - still loud and proud, but definitely in the post-Orr funk of the Don Cherry years. And once you got settled in at the Beanpot, you had some time to read the banners hung from the balconies, and here we are, nudging each other every few seconds, saying "hey look at that!!". One of the tamest I can recall was in the BC section, with a simple drawing of a screw, followed by BU.
Once the game started, the profanity reached epic level heights. These were two teams that had faced each other for the '78 D-1 championship (BU won), but were both fairly decimated by graduation. In retrospect, there were a small handful of guys who were still skating for BU who would leave their marks on the US Olympic Team coached by Herb Brooks a year later in Lake Placid. But it was a great game, high intensity on the ice, and even higher intensity up in the stands. Truth be told, BU was already a second favorite team of mine behind UNH, but it was nice to enjoy as a somewhat "neutral" and appreciate the constant back-and-forth between the two student sections. I'm pretty sure BU won with a late 3rd period goal, not all unlike what would happen a few weeks later when Bobby Gould would do the same for UNH to win their first title. There were some hostilities at the March ECAC title game for sure, but nothing that held a candle to what we experienced at BU vs. BC.
That relatively short window of time - February '79 through February '80 - made me a college hockey fan for life. Under "strange but true" I ended up applying to go to about a half-dozen schools, and three of them were Brandeis, BC and BU. Bentley offered the best overall package and had a curriculum that appealed more to my academic strengths at the time. That didn't stop me and some of my HS pals (most of whom stayed in the area while in school) from continuing to catch the Beanpot for a few more years after that, and it's something I began to revisit later in life on a regular basis until the last few years. Of course, it's never been the same raw experience that it used to be in the old Garden back in the day, although the on-ice intensity probably hasn't changed, the viewing experience has become MUCH tamer than it used to be. And to me, that's kind of sad. We've lost something there. JMHO.
