As the final seconds ticked away on Saturday night, I prepared to immediately make the trek from College Road to the Mods, having learned the rewards for punctuality after the Virginia Tech football game. It isn't often that Boston College wins a national championship in a major sport, let alone against arguably its biggest rival, and I expected the aftermath to make Matt Ryan's comeback seem like a minor event.
I had read of past hockey riots, both celebratory and angry. Alumni posters on Rivals.com forums waxed poetically of the Brian Gionta days, when near-misses in the 1998 and 2000 championship games to Michigan and North Dakota led to the installation of metal picnic tables, bolted into cement, in the Modular backyards.
(To clarify: The old wooden picnic tables were set on fire by an incensed student body and thrown through windows.)
The infamous Mod fence was first put into use to protect the Mods' residents during the 2001 Frozen Four, which was also when the administration first carded students on their way in. The combination of the two, so familiar to current students, was extremely ineffective: Hundreds of students stared down BC Police Department officers, and then rushed the fence and tore parts of it down, ignoring the threat of arrest and partying through the night, while the Office of the Dean for Student Development (ODSD) and ResLife gave up on their attempts to control the chaos.
The year 2001 was not that long ago. The class of 2008 went to school with the very same people who stormed the fence as freshmen in 2001. It was not unreasonable of me to expect a raucous celebration, especially not after the ODSD and ResLife sent so many e-mails and warnings (apparently, they have long memories). But when I arrived on Lower Campus, I found the Mods to be entirely normal. No chaos, no fires, no spontaneous eruption of a normally reserved student body. Just an ordinary Saturday night, the experience of which makes the 2001 story seem fantastical (it's documented in the archives of this newspaper, in case you were wondering).
(It's worth noting that the championship game started at the same time as the Talib Kweli concert, just as the ALC Showdown had coincided with the semifinal game. I personally want to thank BC for making sure Black Family Weekend conflicted with the team's national title run. Seriously, I enjoyed having to choose between two awesome on-campus events and Nathan Gerbe's rise to NCAA immortality.)
Times have changed. Tom O'Brien and Jags have taken us to new heights in football. Al Skinner, this season (and its lack of fan support) notwithstanding, has done the same on the hardwood. When my dad went here in the 1960s, only he and his fellow New Yorkers could be depended on to attend the basketball games; last year, students camped out for 12 hours just to get the best seats for the Duke and UNC games. One can only imagine the celebration that would ensue if the basketball team ever so much as reached a Final Four. Yet when Gerbe, Brennan, and Muse led us to glory on the ice, the campus was dead. Even as I write this article at work, an anonymous student in the hallway is telling someone on his phone, "If football had won the national championship, it would have been 300 times as big."
One wonders how long Jerry York can continue to keep BC at an elite level, despite his deserved status as America's best coach, which should make all of us savor this title. He cannot be expected to out-recruit schools like BU, UNH, and Maine, where hockey is still the king of campus and will be for many years. BC has moved past those days and is not likely to return. Indeed, about the only thing surer than Nathan Gerbe's offensive prowess is that hockey is dying, if not already dead, as a major sport at BC.
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