Rhode Island’s high-school hockey season will end Wednesday with three championship games at the Amica Mutual Pavilion in Providence.
For the boys from Blackstone Valley Schools — a co-op team made up of players from St. Raphael Academy, Providence Country Day, North Providence High School and North Smithfield High School — their hockey journey will continue weeks or even months after the final horn sounds at the conclusion of their Division II final against Lincoln High.
They were on the ice at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket the afternoon of Feb. 15 when a targeted mass shooting resulted in the death of four members of their teammate Colin Dorgan’s family.
Since that tragedy, the players have cried, bonded, practiced, played and triumphed.
Less than a month after the tragedy, on March 11, they celebrated an improbable 3-2 double overtime playoff victory over Portsmouth. Colin Dorgan, a senior, scored the golden goal.
“For everybody else it’s just a feel-good story, and it is a feel-good story,” BVS coach Chris Librizzi told me Monday night. “But for us, and for every person who was inside that rink, we are actually living this every single day, and we have to deal with the aftermath of the trauma of this for a long time until we recover. For any of us, including myself, this will stay with us forever.”
Forever continues Wednesday night.
“We want to prevail, and we want to win a state championship, and we want our boys to be happy,” Librizzi said. “But after this season is over, Wednesday night is when the real healing begins for us. We need to stay together and be together as a family moving forward. I will make sure we stay together at least once a month or twice a month over the next several months as a family, as a hockey family.”
‘I did what my heart told me to do.’
The international hockey family has rallied around the BVS family for the last month. Librizzi said hockey “is a different sport than any other sport. It’s a true family. The hockey community, they just care more than any other sport cares.”
The team has received messages from all over North America, Librizzi said. From Boston Bruins legend and current team president Cam Neely to messages from Winnipeg, Utah, and places in between.
Merrimack College coach Scott Borek called last Saturday.
“(He) said, ’You know, Chris, you can just sit on the couch and whittle your days away and think about this all the time and suck your family into your sadness. Or, you can get up off the couch and live your life like you should be living your life and then everyone will follow you because they see you are doing the right thing,’” Librizzi said. “It’s so true. I really appreciated those words, his guidance. That’s the head coach of a Division I hockey program that took a half-hour out of his day to call me when he was getting ready to prepare for a huge Division I playoff game against the best team in Hockey East, Providence College, and they won,” Librizzi said.
I could hear the awe still in his tone as he recounted that call.
“It’s people like that who made the difference in reaching out to me, calling to make sure our mental health was good, and our team was in a good place.”
Later in our conversation, Librizzi reflected on his response over the last month. “There is no playbook,” he said. “I just care. I did what my heart told me to do.”
‘It was destiny’
BVS carried a mediocre 9-7 record into the playoffs was seeded fifth. They swept the Rogers/Middletown co-op in the best-of-three quarterfinals. Top-seeded Portsmouth (12-1-1-2) beat Cumberland in another quarterfinal.
The favored Patriots did everything but win the semifinal at Schneider Arena.
“I don’t have a hell of a lot to say other than the hockey gods work in mysterious ways,” Portsmouth coach Greg Cunningham said with a slight chuckle. Then he said a lot.
“Speaking purely from a hockey point of view, we dominated the game and should have won, probably 8-1. However —and it needs to be a capital HOWEVER — for one reason or another we were unable to put the puck in the net. It shouldn’t have gotten to overtime, had we been able to do the things we were so close to doing. Once the game gets to overtime, anything can happen. Unfortunately, we ended up on the short end of the stick,” he said.
“We hit a couple of posts. Maybe three times the puck trickled right across the goal mouth,” Cunningham said. “If our sticks were maybe 2 or 3 inches longer, we might have been able to poke the puck in the net. But it wasn’t meant to be.”
Librizzi agreed.
“Greg hit the nail on the head. It was destiny. We watched the game tonight after practice. They had multiple opportunities in front of the net with nobody present, and the puck just did not go in. I whispered to one of my captains, Declan St. Vincent, ‘This is destiny.’”
Said Cunningham: “Both teams played a hell of a hockey game. Any time you go to double overtime, it’s a shame one team had to lose. It was a great game. When we played them earlier in the year, the game went to overtime.”
Here’s how this instant classic ended.
In the second overtime Connor Rogers, Portsmouth senior and captain, skated down the right wing toward BVS goalie Jacob Faria, also a senior and captain. Rogers wisely decided against an uncontested wrist shot because he couldn’t get “between the dots” of the face-off circles and took the puck around the net with the idea of stuffing it home. But he lost control of the puck.
BVS’s Camden Governo, another senior and co-captain, gathered the loose puck on the right wing, looked up and spotted Dorgan at center ice. Governo flicked a perfect pass that Dorgan turned into a breakaway. He reached the slot and took the shot. The puck slipped between the goalie Ben Humm’s pads. Game over. BVS 3, Portsmouth 2. Pandemonium.
Dorgan raised his arms in jubilation, turned and let his momentum carry him along the boards. His teammates swarmed all over him. Hundreds of screaming students and even players from other teams spilled from the stands toward the glass and pounded away in celebration.
“Colin had angels on his shoulders carrying him through the neutral zone into the offensive zone and then fired the puck home,” Librizzi said. “You couldn’t have ended the game with a better piece with him being open like he was and Cam Governo seeing him. He followed exactly to the T what I asked the team to do after the second intermission. I asked the players to shoot low because that’s how the first goal was scored. Colin came out of the locker room and said that in our huddle: ‘Boys, make sure we shoot low. Keep the puck low.’ And that’s exactly what he did.”
Standing behind the Portsmouth bench, Cunningham didn’t even realize who scored.
“Probably until we left,” he told me Monday. “You have to understand, as a coach you go from coaching the team in this incredibly intense moment filled with incredible emotion and passion and you’re right on the brink to all of a sudden now you become a grief counselor. It’s 32 players who have been working with you almost every day since the end of November, and their families. That’s your attention. It breaks your heart to see all of them upset.”
After a pause, Cunningham offered this comment.
“In the grand scheme of things, years down the road, a victory here or a loss there probably doesn’t mean a great deal, but what that young man had to endure… I can only imagine that he recognizes all the love and support from the hockey world that’s been extended to him. And it was probably such an incredible feeling for him to be able to score that goal and give back to his teammates and all their fans and all their families that we have this victory.”
On the ice, Librizzi found Dorgan and wrapped him in a giant bear hug. The cheering grew so loud that one would have thought Schneider Arena was filled to capacity. And there probably was not a dry eye in the building.
“He was crying. I was crying,” Librizzi said. “I told him I was so proud of him. Everybody is so proud of him. His family is so proud of him. His mom is so proud of him for how he’s been a pillar of strength during this whole situation, through this whole tragedy, and I’m so happy with what just developed. And at the end I said, ‘Thank you for following my directions. You’re the only one that listened.’ Then I let go. It was great.”
‘This does not end now’
Librizzi predicts a hard-fought final with Lincoln. “The team that stays out of the penalty box the most will be the team that prevails at the end,” he said.
When it’s over and the cheering has faded and players have moved on to spring sports and summer jobs and college, does Chris Librizzi worry about what happens to Colin Dorgan?
“Absolutely not, because I will be right by his side,” he answered without hesitation. “This does not end now, and I told him that multiple times over the last month. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to be by his side. I’ll be at his graduation. I was invited to his graduation party by his grandmother this past weekend. I went to visit her in the hospital the other day. He has a great family of support from his loved ones within his own family to his hockey family. We’ll be here forever for him, or however long he would like us.”
