Women’s Hockey: Terriers take a commanding home victory over Merrimack

The BU Women’s Hockey team’s 5-game winning streak gets extended with a 6-3 victory over the Merrimack Warriors at Walter Brown Arena this evening.

Things started out strongly for the Warriors as Jr. forward Mikayla Grant-Mentis scored the game’s first goal just over 2 minutes in. After that, other then a minor cross-checking penalty on Abby cook, the first period wrapped up with a total of 30 shots on goal between the teams and just 1 goal successfully scored.

Midway into the second period the offensive floodgates opened for the Terriers. Starting with Kristina Schuler, who scored two total goals in the period, along with goals by Mckenna Parker and Emma Wuthrich, the Terriers walked into the second period trailing 1-0 and came out leading 4-1.

Schuler and her line of Deziray de Sousa and Nara Elia played exceptionally well racking up 2 of the 6 goals and 4 assists while also playing lights-out defense in both the second and the whole game on the way to victory. Schuler said of her line that “sometimes bounces don’t really go your way… and today fortunately, they went our way.”

The third period featured plenty of drama, as Grant-Mentis scored her second goal of the game 9:38 in to pull the Warriors within 2. Then almost 10 minutes later it was Grant-Mentis again, with an extra attacker on the ice and just under a minute to go, scoring her third goal of the night to make it 4-3 Terriers.

The last minute featured two strong attempts by Merrimack to get that game-tying goal, but the first two faceoffs after Grant-Mentis’ third goal resulted in open-net goals from BU, the first by Sammy Davis and the second by Mckenna Parker. BU was able to put the lead out of sight and come away with a 6-3 win.

At the end of the day, it came down to who played their game best and like Schuler said “we might not have played a full 60 but we were close.” Indeed it seemed that after the hiccup 2 minutes in, the Terriers had command of this game and never let it go. Despite “letting them back in late” as coach Brian Durocher stated, the Terriers’ two open-net goals right at the end capped off what was a very well played game.

With the victory BU improves their streak to 6 straight wins and a 11-5-4 mark in conference play, Merrimack drops to 10-8-1. Despite that streak, Schuler says the team is “trying to stay as collected as possible… and go game by game.” This series will wrap up at Merrimack tomorrow and then the Warriors will play host to Providence for one game while the Terriers will head to Vermont for one as they prepare for the 2019 Beanpot.