In my last blog, I spoke about my Hockey East internship with NESN. Over the course of the last few months, my big project has been to work on Beanpot feature stories—this year was the 60th Anniversary of the Beanpot, and I spent hours working on footage of interviews with past and present Beanpot players for the celebration of that anniversary. The culmination of the project came this past Monday when BU met BC in the Beanpot Finals.
For both teams, there was a lot on the line for the game: either BU was going to with its 30th title overall (half of all 60 Beanpot tournaments ever played!) or BC was going to win its 3rd straight. As I walked through the Garden on Monday night, I recognized the faces of many Beanpot greats—many faces that I had become very familiar with while logging their interviews. The atmosphere was exciting, and I knew it was going to be a good game.
Being a current BU student and a NESN intern presents an interesting situation—I’m really supposed to be unbiased, but in a crowd of scarlet and gold it gets a little tricky. During the overtime period, I was watching the game on a tiny screen right outside of the BC locker room. Every time something happened, I would make the opposite reaction of the people around me, prompting the NESN producer I was with to say, “Let’s go over to the BU side.” (Good idea.) So for the rest of the overtime period I watched with some of the BU athletic staff in the setting below:
With about 10 seconds left in overtime, BC retained possession of the puck and skated it into BU’s zone. The man standing next to me started saying, “Don’t do anything stupid…don’t do anything stupid—” and then BC sophomore Bill Arnold put it in the back of the net with 6.4 seconds left to give BC the win. Because I was there with NESN and not with BUTV, I had to run back over to the BC side of the locker rooms, where I watched the celebrations, postgame interviews, and trophy presentation from the BC bench. Talk about rubbing salt in an open wound.
The Beanpot taught me an important lesson on being a sportscaster in a situation where I might be biased. Journalism needs to be impartial, but I can’t imagine myself wanting to work anywhere besides in Boston. If everything eventually works out and I end up back in the Bean as a professional journalist, I will have had this time to practice my internal cheering and external neutrality. But for now—GO BU!