Editor’s note: This story was adapted from one that originally appeared on USCHO.com in 2012.
Boston University and Minnesota have played 26 times. Each has won 12, with two ties.
The deadlock will be broken at the Frozen Four when the Terriers play the Golden Gophers in the April 6 semifinals in Tampa, Fla.
It will take a lot for that game to match what happened at the same point in the tournament 47 years earlier.
Minnesota and Boston University played a national semifinal on March 26, 1976, at the old Denver Arena. Before the game was 70 seconds old it produced a wild, bench-clearing brawl that not only stopped play for, according to some accounts, 30 minutes, it started a war of words between coaches Jack Parker of BU and Herb Brooks of Minnesota.
The accounts vary, but things got heated after the Terriers’ Terry Meagher was sent to the penalty box for slashing, barely a half-minute after Minnesota’s Russ Anderson was called for cross-checking. The penalty box at DU Arena at the time was one undivided area that also happened to be right next to the Minnesota bench.
According to a Denver Post account of the melee, Parker said Meagher was spit upon by a Minnesota player. Meagher spit back and hit Gophers trainer Gary Smith, and then sticks started swinging and the brawl was on.
It took about 10 minutes before order was restored, and then game officials Dino Paniccia and Frank Kelley headed into the referees’ dressing room to meet with the officials from the other semifinal, Medo Martinello and Bill Riley, Harvard coach Bill Cleary, former Boston College coach Snooks Kelley, WCHA head of officials Bob Gilray, NCAA ice hockey committee chair Burt Smith, the NCAA’s Dennis Poppe and both coaches.
They eventually came up with punishments that would keep the game going — game misconducts to just Meagher and Anderson.
“Normally, everybody that left the bench would be gone,” Burt Smith told the Rocky Mountain News at the time.
Without Meagher, the MVP of the ECAC tournament that season who was head coach at Division III Bowdoin from 1983 to 2016, Boston University fell 4-2 to Minnesota, which became national champions with a victory over Michigan Tech.
As for that war of words between Parker and Brooks?
Parker told the Boston Globe at the time there was “no question they came out with the intent of running at us. It obviously is the coach’s philosophy. He not only tolerates it. He condones it.”
Parker added to the paper: “Herb Brooks is known as Herb Bush in the WCHA and now I know why. It is obviously the way he thinks the game should be played. It’s the way he wants it. I don’t happen to agree with him.”
For his part, Brooks, who later famously coached players from both teams to the Olympic gold medal in 1980, dismissed Parker’s accusations and fired back.
“He blew his team’s chances by not pulling the goalie and creating a six-on-four chance in that last minute,” Brooks told the Denver Post at the time. “If he says we came out deliberately trying to run at them, it shows an immature coach and it’s sour grapes.”
A lot has changed in 47 years since. That 1976 game was the seventh in the series, so there have been 19 played since (20 if you count a 1996 Hall of Fame Game that was, at the time, an exhibition).
They have played more NCAA tournament games, including BU wins in the national semifinals in 1994 and 1995. The Terriers played their last game at Walter Brown Arena and their first at Agganis Arena against the Gophers in 2005, the most recent regular-season games in the series.
Minnesota beat BU 7-3 in the first round of the 2012 NCAA tournament in St. Paul, Minn., to even the all-time series. The Gophers have won five of eight games between the teams in the national tournament but the Terriers have won three of the five that took place in the Frozen Four.
“We have had a great rivalry, there’s no question about that,” Parker said in 2012.
He said the game that stands out, though, was the one in Denver in 1976.
“In reality, everybody should have been kicked out for fighting, according to the rules,” Parker said in 2012. “The other semifinal was already played. I think if we were the first semifinal, they probably would have let the other semifinal be the national championship game, that’s how bad the fight was.
“And that had a bad taste in our mouths for a while. We wound up in the same league, so to speak, when we had the interlocking schedule with the WCHA and Hockey East [from 1984 to 1989], and the animosity disappeared.”
