Each program also represents an important subsegment of the deep and rich college hockey tradition dotting the New England geographical landscape. To the modern game, each team is a mainstay on the nationally televised college hockey circuit, but their different roots illustrate the growth of a game that began with humble roots in the cold weather, NHL markets. Their individual success stories are part of the game’s fabric, but their unmistakable competence and capacity for producing professional-grade talent is a reason why Friday night’s game forever represents the cross-section of the game’s past, present and future.
“There’s a lot of turmoil in college hockey right today,” said Quinnipiac head coach Rand Pecknold during his conference’s preseason media call. “With COVID and the five-year rule, today we have the CHL and the transfer portal, we don’t change much each year. We tweak things here or there, but we do a really good job from a recruiting standpoint. We make sure to get players that fit our culture, fit our identity. We need to work with them, and they need to mature when they get here, but we do a great job of bringing the right kids in the door, and that’s why we’ve had success.”
College hockey claims a history book that dates back to a post-World War II era devoid of the current conference setup. Nearly every team sponsoring hockey was part of an independent conglomerate of leagues based solely on geography or academic background, and none of the six current conferences existed in their current form. The large bulk of teams were part of an independent landscape featuring teams from the Midwest and Northeast, and even New England’s fabled Ivy League programs were spread throughout the Pentagonal League and the unaffiliated landscape.
No official designation separated teams into different divisions, but the four teams competing in the first four-team national tournament included large scale programs from Boston College, Dartmouth, Michigan and Colorado College. Under the direction of new head coach John Kelley, those Eagles had finished second in the New England Intercollegiate Hockey League and earned an invitation by winning the conference tournament. Though technically an at-large team, they were the second-seeded team from the Eastern region and lost a semifinal game, strange as it sounds, by two goals after they advanced to a full overtime period.
“The Eagles gave the favored Michigan sextet a terrific fight and managed to tie the score at 4-4 in the last 50 seconds after pulling out their goalie to give them an extra player down the ice,” screamed The Boston Daily Globe in its postgame morning edition. “Connie Hill, a rugged, bespectacled defense man, was the shining star in the victory, Michigan’s 19th of the season. Hill performed the hat trick with three goals and assisted in one other. In addition, he was a power on defense.”
Quinnipiac’s program didn’t exist during that era and wasn’t part of the college hockey landscape until its arrival in Division III’s ECAC-3 conference in the mid-1970s. BC, by then, had 10 different appearances in the major division’s final weekend, but the then-named Braves wouldn’t have ever crossed paths with the Eagles because they essentially played down from their Division II status for nearly 30 years. A move to D-II in the late 1990s brought them within earshot of the scholarship-sponsored programs, but it wasn’t until the NCAA stopped sponsoring the middle tier that Northeast teams banded together and formed a cost containment league under the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s sponsorship.
It was within this structure that the team truly flourished, and after spending a few years in the MAAC and its spiritual successor at Atlantic Hockey, Quinnipiac found itself invited to ECAC after Vermont defected to Hockey East. A subsequent name change to the Bobcats coincided with a move from the underfunded and municipal Northford Ice Pavilion, and by the end of the decade, Pecknold’s movements within the program helped open the TD Bank Sports Center as part of an overall strategy to boost admissions through athletics.
today 20 years later, the move is an unquestionable success, and the Bobcats are a three-time Frozen Four participant with eight consecutive conference championships within the ECAC league featuring the traditional powerhouses from the Ivy League and places like Clarkson. The 2023 national championship hung its first banner in Hamden, Connecticut to complete a pipe dream that previously made a Division I title virtually impossible, but the end result is today a megalith in a hockey league that’s challenged the best of the best on an annual basis.
“We always like to play a tough schedule in October,” admitted Pecknold. “I’m not going to lie – it’s hard. Non-conference scheduling is tough. We’ve got [teams] like BC and BU that we’re going to play every year, and we play Maine every year. For a long time, we used to play UMass all the time, and we’d like to get them back on the schedule if we can find the dates. But it’s hard. There are teams who don’t want to play us because we’re good, [and] they want to pad their schedule. We have to scrap and claw to get our games, but there are enough teams like BC and BU that want to play the best, too. We’re fortunate to have them.”
For all of that recent success, their divergent histories meant Boston College didn’t play Quinnipiac before the 2016 Frozen Four in Tampa, Florida. Their first regular season meeting was two years later with a 1-1 tie at the start of the 2017-2018 season, and former head coach Jerry York ended his tenure in 2021-2022 without a head-to-head victory against Pecknold. Both Greg Brown‘s first game as head coach of BC and the first game of the Bobcats’ national championship defense featured a matchup between the two clubs, but the Eagles only started earning wins over Quinnipiac when they clinched the 2-1 victory in Hamden at the start of the 2023-2024 season.
“I think we’ll learn a lot about ourselves early in the season,” said Brown. “It’s great to see early that the level of college hockey is at a high level, so I think the learning curve will be quick when you have a tough schedule like that, out of the gate. I also think that the intensity and the excitement of our training camp has been able to stay high because the guys know what’s ahead of them early on.”
No. 6 BC and No. 13 Quinnipiac begin the 2025-2026 season on Friday night when the Eagles host the Bobcats at Conte Forum. Puck drop is slotted for 7 p.m. and can be seen via the ESPN Plus subscription service for direct-to-consumer programming, available through the network’s family of Internet and mobile device apps.
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