Keeper of fame for NU

Thiessen is key in Beanpot bid

It was a most unfamiliar feeling, particularly for a Northeastern goaltender on the first Monday in February. Brad Thiessen was standing in the crease at the Garden surrounded by thousands of empty seats. That wasn't the unfamiliar part - NU routinely plays before sparse crowds on Causeway Street. The novelty was the timing - just before 11 p.m., when the Huskies and their dogged followers usually are back on Huntington Avenue while the Beanpot continues without them.

This year, the seats were empty because Northeastern was five goals up on Boston College's defending national champions on the opening night of the tournament, with only the black-jerseyed celebrants upstairs still on the premises, delightedly counting down the minutes.

"For those kids up there, it means everything to them to be able to cheer on the team and be able to say that they won a game in the Beanpot," says Thiessen. "It's pretty special for them."

So has it come around for the Hounds, who are ranked third in the land just three seasons after they had only three wins, their fewest in 36 years. Tomorrow night they'll face top-ranked Boston University in their first championship game in four years, looking for their first title since 1988, when most of their current players were toddlers.

If Northeastern finally wins the silver pot, for only the fifth time in 57 years, odds are that its junior goaltender, who leads the country in saves, will be the primary reason.

"Thees has definitely been our best player this year so far," testifies senior forward Rob Rassey. "He's kept us in a lot of games and he's won us some games. Having him back there is definitely a comfort."

When he was checking out colleges, Thiessen didn't know Northeastern from Northwestern. He had grown up on a poultry farm in Aldergrove, British Columbia, and when he learned that NU was interested in him, he had to check out the place on the Internet.

"I'd never heard of Northeastern before," he says. "I didn't know what a Beanpot was, or even what league they played in."

Nor did the school know much about Thiessen, who played for the Merritt Centennials in the British Columbia junior league. What coach Greg Cronin did know was that the Huskies needed to improve on 3-24-7 and that he didn't have a No. 1 goalie who could play 34 games. Yet on the night that recruiter Gene Reilly checked him out, Thiessen was pulled after being shelled.

The question was how much to make of one rough outing in a shoot-'em-up circuit.

"To me, it's like the Wild West," says Cronin, who has four players from the BCHL on his roster. "It's all offense, just flow-go, flow-go, shoot pucks, no defense. Which is great when you're recruiting offensive players, but it's nerve-racking when you're trying to evaluate goalies."

What caught Cronin's eye was one telling statistic: Thiessen's league-record 250-minute shutout streak for a break-even team. With North Dakota, Cornell, and Clarkson all after him, Northeastern had to make a decisive move.

"We thought, we've either got to stick with these two guys we've got or we've got to take a leap of faith on a goalie," says the coach.

Cronin studied DVDs of Thiessen and hit the phone.

"I did a ton of homework," he says. "I called a gazillion people that I knew from that league and everybody spoke highly of him."

For that recruiting class, character meant nearly as much as talent, since the freshmen would be thrown to the lions. What the Huskies needed was a sanguine operator who could withstand a barrage of rubber and tolerate more L's than W's for a while.

"You're not going to come off rebuilding a program running," says Cronin. "You're going to get knocked to your knees a few times, but you're going to have courage and the fortitude to get up. And there's no more stressful position than goalie."

Thiessen was used to facing a cannonade in juniors. What attracted him to Northeastern was the idea of an urban campus with multiple diversions within a few trolley stops and a solid journalism program, plus the chance to start on Day 1.

"One of the things that excited me was the fact that Cro was bringing guys in to try and help rebuild," says Thiessen, who has started all but four of 100 games since his arrival. "That's why a lot of us came here, to have that chance to turn the program around and have an opportunity to play right away."

To most of his new teammates, Thiessen was a 6-foot rumor.

"Not many kids knew about him at all," recalls captain Joe Vitale. "It was like, we've got a new goalie coming in - I think he's OK. After the first couple of practices, we were like, 'Man, this kid can play.' We saw that right away. We knew he had something special."

Thiessen's debut came against top-ranked BC at Conte Forum, where the stands were filled with a gold-jerseyed, R-dropping, catcalling chorus.

"On the road, first game against the No. 1 team in the country," recalls Thiessen, who faced 10 power plays and made 32 saves in a 5-2 loss. "That was the introduction to college hockey."

The first month was a grueling gauntlet, with eight of 10 games away from St. Botolph Street, but Thiessen held up well enough under fire, backstopping a draw at Vermont and a victory at Michigan and keeping most games close. The victories began coming in December and the Huskies ended up 13-18-5, with decisions over BC and BU before the Eagles clawed them apart in the Hockey East playoffs.

"Everyone was excited about a 10-win improvement, but we still were under .500 and we got hammered in the first round of the playoffs and we're done," remembers Thiessen, who set a school record for save percentage (.921). "So it was disappointing."

Last season was downright Dickensian - best of times, worst of times. After running off a two-month, 11-game unbeaten streak between November and January, NU won only half a dozen games the rest of the way.

"Things kind of caught up with us and we weren't really sure how to deal with the winning and the expectations that came with it," says Thiessen. "All of a sudden we were on an 11-game winning streak and it hits you: 'Oh, what are we doing here?' We're not supposed to do that. We're Northeastern."

The goalie went on a slide, too.

"I wasn't playing my game," Thiessen says. "I was trying to do too much, maybe trying to stop the slide by myself, and not doing the things that got us to that point."

So he went to see Cronin before the final regular-season series with BC, acknowledged that he wasn't playing well, asked for help getting back to basics, and turned things around for the playoffs.

Humility is the willingness to be educated, Cronin tells his squad, and Thiessen is eminently humble.

"Everybody's a hero when you win," the coach says. "They love the spotlight. As soon as you start losing, they all run to the shadows. But Brad's staying there: Put the spotlight right on me. I'm mature enough and mentally tough enough to take it."

On a team of democratic grinders with one gifted sniper (Ryan Ginand), the goalie has to be the stand-up guy. Cronin stated that flatly before the season. It's not so much Thiessen's uncommon skills - his deft hands, his positioning, his vision, his puckhandling - as it is what his coach calls his contagious confidence and his unflappability.

"The thing that stands out most about Brad is, he doesn't get rattled when things don't go his way," says Vitale. "He doesn't let losses get to him, doesn't let bad goals get to him. He stays even-keel."

That's how Thiessen was able to shrug off a 6-4 loss at UMass last weekend and come back to stone BC in Northeastern's first opening-round victory over the Eagles since 1988 and its biggest margin in any meeting since 1994.

"Thiessen was outstanding," saluted BC coach Jerry York after watching him make 45 saves, three of them on breakaways. "He made some remarkable saves."

If Thiessen makes a few dozen more tomorrow night against 28-time Beanpot champion BU, he and his mates could be taking a victory lap around the Garden ice with a most unfamiliar keepsake.

"For people around here, the Beanpot's everything," says the man from a place where pots are for chickens. "For me, it'd be nice to win it, but I think I'd rather win a national championship.

"We have to realize that whatever happens on Monday, we still have a long way to go and lots more things that we need to accomplish here."

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.