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.