ORONO — Albin Boija hopes it was an accident when a Holy Cross player ran him over near the red line during pregame warmups prior to Saturday night’s game at Alfond Arena. Boija has no idea who it even was. But with some Holy Cross players chirping at him while he was laid out on the ice, the University of Maine goalie turned the incident into motivation.
“He might not have been looking, but I don’t know why you wouldn’t be looking when you’re skating through a whole team of players. He skated me right over. He just ran me full over,” Boija said. “I knew I wasn’t going to talk back or hit them back or anything. That’s not going to do anything. So I just wanted to beat them, and they’re 0-2 this weekend, so I feel that speaks for itself.”
Composed and energized, Boija made 22 saves for the seventh shutout of his career in Maine’s 6-0 win.
“He makes the routine saves look really easy,” Maine coach Ben Barr said. “That was (Holy Cross goalie Danick Leroux’s) first game. Obviously, it’s a tough place to play your first game at. A lot of the shot quality was probably similar, but Albin’s just experienced and he just holds on to the puck, and it seems easy for him.”
Do not take Albin Boija for granted. Barr sure doesn’t. Neither do any of Boija’s teammates.
Boija, a junior from Sundsvall, Sweden, is now tied with Frank Doyle for second in career shutouts with the Black Bears. Jimmy Howard’s record of 15 shutouts is a million miles away, but Boija already has established himself among the best goalies to pull on a Maine sweater.
An All-American last season, Boija was the MVP of the Hockey East tournament as Maine won its first conference title in 21 years. In two games this season, allowing two goals on 42 shots, Boija has picked up right where he left off.
“He’s a rock back there,” said forward Josh Nadeau.
Reliable goalies are like mechanics. When you find a top-notch one, you thank your lucky stars. In Boija, the Black Bears have a netminder they know is unlikely to give up a goal softer than two scoops of chocolate on a hot summer day. He’ll make the routine saves look easy, and he’ll make the harder ones look easy, too.
And occasionally, he’ll make a save that makes the entire college hockey world gasp, like he did late last season against UMass when he dove across the crease and stretched out like Superman in mid-flight to rob Dans Locmelis.
There was nothing like that Saturday night, just steady, quiet saves. Boija was his strongest when Maine needed him the most, early when the game was still close. The Black Bears killed four penalties in the game’s first 24 minutes, maintaining a 1-0 lead in the process before breaking the game open with two goals later in the second period and three more in the third.
Seventeen of Boija’s 22 saves came in the first two periods. In the third, he was called on to stop the puck just five times.
The Black Bears spent the final 1:58 of the game on the penalty kill, too, but Oskar Komarov’s short-handed goal at 18:53 sucked any remaining offensive swagger out of the Crusaders and made Boija’s path to the shutout easier.
Asked to think of a save that stood out, Boija couldn’t.
“Nothing really specific. The boys did a really good job shutting the most dangerous stuff down. I just had to come up with the ones they had,” he said.
Just steady and reliable. Exactly what you need.
