from Steve Buckley of the Boston Herald,

First, he had to sit in that tiny dressing room inside TD Garden last night and talk about giving up one of the most gruesome goals in the history of college hockey. He was manning the net in the third period of the Frozen Four championship game, his BU Terriers holding a one-goal lead over Providence College with less than nine minutes remaining. The Friars’ Tom Parisi, meandering around center ice, lifted a pop fly of a shot toward O’Connor. It should have been easy: Catch the puck and deposit it behind the net, where it would be collected by teammate Jack Eichel. It turned out to be anything but easy.

When O’Connor extended his glove, the puck went in, went out. It fell to the ice. O’Connor couldn’t find it. It trickled between his legs and into the net. Tie game, 8:36 remaining.

It wasn’t the goal that lost the game for BU, but it was the goal that broke BU. A little more than two minutes later, Brandon Tanev scored to put the Friars ahead to stay.

Final score: Providence 4, Boston University 3.

“Everybody in this locker room deserved a lot better,” O’Connor told the first wave of reporters. “They deserve to be hoisting a national championship right now. Sports are tough . . . but everyone in this locker room . . . sometimes you lose the puck in the lights in the Garden . . . you get a weird bounce and things happen . . .”

He wasn’t speaking sentences. He was speaking words, one after the other, piles of words, not all of them jiving with each other.

He was asked what his coaches and teammates said to him after the game.

“A lot of people tried to remind me that the reason we were here was partly because of my performance,” he said, “but a lot of it was just a way to make me feel better.”

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Watch the game tying goal by Providence below...