Northeastern, Boston College, Boston University and Harvard are vying for bragging rights as the top hockey team in the city. Each school in the tournament has that "this is our year" feeling and that "'this is why" attitude.
Northeastern has gone the longest of the four teams since winning the Beanpot. The last time the Huskies won the tournament was 1988.
Jonathan Raymond, who graduated from Northeastern in 2010, believes this could be the year for the Huskies. He explains why below.
Every year, for the three years I was involved with the student newspaper at Northeastern, we'd run out the annual "this is why Northeastern will finally win the Beanpot again" stories. Every year, we'd trick ourselves into thinking the team could do it.
Find some reason or another why this team was different than the number of failed predecessors since our Huskies last won the Beanpot in 1988. Be it an All-American goalie here or a hot streak coming into the tournament there, we always found something that, we hoped, would give the student readership a reason to believe.
And each of those years it was, of course, a fruitless effort — because, as everyone knows, Northeastern never wins the Beanpot.
I was as guilty of thinking that it'd be different for me than it was for all the classes that came and went before I arrived as a freshman in 2006. It was not. I graduated in 2010 having never celebrated a Beanpot championship, like every other Northeastern student that's passed through Huntington Ave. since the first George Bush began his presidency.
Suffering through Beanpot heartbreak is as ingrained in the Northeastern psyche as explaining what co-op is, how we're not related to that Big 10 school in Chicago or knowing what to order at Chicken Lou's. It’s part of the very cultural fabric of NU.
But we go through the motions anyway. Because it's going to happen some time. And when it does it'll feel far sweeter than BU's 30th Beanpot title or BC's 16th or even Harvard’s 11th.
Northeastern’s fifth will be for everyone who came through in the last two decades and never got to make that victorious Green Line trip from the Garden back to campus on the E train.
As for this year, at least, what've the Huskies got going for them? What gives them any shot at ending the drought other teams haven't?
Well, Chris Rawlings is a damn good goaltender. Wade MacLeod and Tyler McNeely are starting to fulfill the expectations that come with being seniors. And some of the freshman talent, like Anthony Bitetto, Jamie Oleksiak and Brodie Reid, aren't playing quite like freshmen anymore.
The Huskies also are on a pretty solid run, going 5-1-2 since the new year began.
But is this Northeastern team particularly more special than any of the other ones that came before and couldn't crack the Beanpot? Eh, probably not.
So why, again, is this the year Northeastern finally wins the Beanpot exactly? Because. It's gotta happen some time.
