The Boston University men's hockey team opens its 2012-13 season tomorrow night at home against Providence. I will not be there. It will be the first home opener I've missed going back to the team's tenure at Walter Brown Arena. More notable, however, is that this will likely be the first season in which I will not attend a single game since I first started at BU as a student - in 1987.

The reasons for this can be found in this document and in details uncovered in its preparation. The two arrests for sexual assault last year were troubling enough, but the fuller picture compounds things.

I'm not going to say I'm shocked by what's been revealed - it's hard to be truly shocked when you grow up on the Georgia academic scandal to the Oklahoma drug scandal and everything at Miami, not to mention SMU's death penalty and whatever basketball point shaving scandal you want to bring up - but I'm hugely disappointed that this occured at my alma mater. I certainly can't support it, and as a long-time season ticket holder I have no interest in subsidizing it.

Am I going to ignore the team entirely this season? I would like to say yes, but I know at some point I'll tune in to one of the many games that will be televised. Twenty-five years of fandom does not go away easily.

I will say that the university didn't play hard ball too much when we cancelled the tickets - there was a little harrumphing about being in the second year of a three year agreement - so I think someone realized it's in their long-term interest to forego a year or two of revenue for the potential of fans coming back as long-term season ticket holders in the future.

So what will it take for us to start up as season ticket holders again? Speaking only for myself, I can think of three fairly obvious requirements:

1. No arrests. For anything, for at least a couple of seasons.I would like to say no arrests ever again, but I know the reality is that some idiot is going to get picked up for urinating in public at some point, and for whatever reason I think I'd be better with that in 2015 than in, say, December.

2. Player turnover. Getting through the current crop of juniors and seniors will help, and while it's unfair to think that all of the players in these classes are potential felons, they are also veterans of a team where inappropriate behavior was not seen as such. My hope here is that the newer players are more of a reflection of what's expected from high profile athletes.

3. A new coach. This is the hardest condition to write, as Jack Parker is synonymous with BU men's hockey. It's easy to see him as the college hockey equivalent of Bear Bryant, a coach who would stay at the helm until the very last. I have no idea if he has any benchmarks he wants to hit before he retires - most wins, another Beanpot-Hockey East-NCAA treble - but he may want to amend his goals and get someone (Mike Bavis?) prepped to take over sooner rather than later.

As for this year, I may take in some of the BU women's hockey team games - they're also nationally prominent, and tickets will not be hard to come by. I'm also thinking I may get to a couple of men's basketball games this year, the last in which they'll play in the America East conference. Who knows, 25 years from now I may still be going to see these teams.

I'd not written about this year's BU men's ice hockey team yet as i never quite got my finger on them. They started the year 6-0-4, grabbed the top spot in the polls, and then proceeded to tank, with a loss and tie Brown and a blowout loss to RPI. They lost all four games they played against BC, and became the first BU team in 31 years to finish last at the Beanpot. They turned things around a bit towards the end of the season, going on a run against the weaker teams in Hockey East, before playing Northeastern in both the final weekend of the regular season and the first round of the playoffs.

I write about them in the past tense as tonight they lost the deciding game in their playoff series against NU, and they are almost certainly not going to make the NCAA tournament (though I'll have to fiddle around with USCHO's Pairwise Predictor a bit to prove it). And while I'm never happy when a season ends, I think this probably the right ending for this team (as bad as it makes me feel for the two seniors on the team, who deserved better).

In some ways this year's team reminded me of the 2007-08 squad, another talented group that underachieved and missed the NCAAs. Both squads had skilled players, solid goaltending, and an apparent disinterest in playing a full game. Jack Parker called both teams out for a lack of effort and passion. Both teams had a sure-fire pro in his freshman year (Colin Wilson and Charlie Coyle) who put up good numbers but didn't seem present. There are differences between the teams as well - the '08 team had distinct captain issues, while this year's did not, for example - but in the end I think the similarities outweigh the differences.

Now, that '08 team came back the following year and put together what is probably the best season in BU history, winning every trophy they could en route to the national title. I don't know if this year's team has the same potential, but with almost everyone coming back, and hopefully coming back with a bad taste in their mouths for how badly they squandered this season, I am keeping my fingers crossed. The puck drops again in seven months.

40 Days, 40 Churches

Day 30: Marsh Chapel, Boston MA

I imagine at least a few of you are familiar with this building, even if just from walking by it. Original plans were for something much grander, but had to be scaled back due to cost and stability concerns (our campus is, in large part, built on landfill). Even so, it's one of the better on-campus chapels I've been in, and does a nice job balancing spiritual needs with secular/educational themes (where else can you find stained glass windows with Presidents Lincoln and Cleveland?).

I can't say I was a regular celebrant here. I occasionally went to the mid-day Mass on holidays, jammed in with the rest of the C&E Catholics. I went to the evening Mass more often than I'd care to remember. This is the "contemporary" service, or as I like to call it, the hippie Mass. Lots of guitar, hand-holding and other stuff that I try to avoid. Only on one or two occasions did I attend the night Mass with instrumental music, which is odd as it's the one I most preferred. I just never quite got worked up enough to make the walk down from West Campus every week.

The last couple of years that I worked at BU I would go to the Good Friday meditations, where a variety of chaplains would speak, with sermons separated by music. It takes three hours to sit through the whole thing, which I never did.

And, of course, I've been to one wedding there, complete with an appearance from Rhett. I'll let those more directly involved with the experience comment if they so choose.