BOSTON - Six years ago, Boston University's 2009 team pulled off the most dramatic comeback in the history of the national championship game.

This time around, the Terriers were the ones who had the upper hand but couldn't deliver the knockout blow, and a title that was 20 minutes from their grasp instead slipped through their fingers.

The BU players sat in stunned silence in the TD Garden locker room, left to ponder any number of cruel ironies. In every big game of the season, BU's trademarks had been dominant third periods, fantastic goaltending, and an uncanny knack for scoring the late goal when they most needed it.

But despite setting an NCAA championship game record by piling up 40 shots on goal in the first two periods, the Terriers only came away with a one-goal advantage. This time Providence was the team that dominated the third period, goalie Matt O'Connor gave up an uncharacteristic soft goal, and a thrilling bid for a game-tying goal in the waning seconds by Cason Hohmann and Nick Roberto didn't quite find the net.

Perhaps the greatest irony was this: As the youngest team in college hockey, this team started the year picked to finish sixth in Hockey East this season coming off a fairly disastrous 2013-14 campaign, and yet they finished the year believing that they really should have won not just the Beanpot and Hockey East championship but the national championship, too.

"I think we expected ourselves to get to this point," Hobey Baker winner Jack Eichel said at his locker stall afterwards, still trying to process it all. "It's a tough loss to swallow. It's an incredible group."

"Obviously, we had a hell of a season," junior Mike Moran said. "Guys come to BU to win Beanpots, Hockey East championships and the national title. We fell short on the last one there, so it'll sting."

"To go from the year we had last year to be that close to winning a national title is an incredible accomplishment," BU coach David Quinn said at the postgame press conference. "And it shouldn't be lost in all of this and I would love to be sitting here as the national champion. I'd like to have our guys have smiles on their faces instead of tears in their eyes, but sometimes it's a process."

The process this year put BU ahead of its schedule in rebuilding its status as a perennial contender for league and national championships. That said, the team faced a long road to make the short trip from campus to the Frozen Four in Boston's TD Garden.

How bad was the team's record in 2013-14? Imagine this: Last year, the Terriers had a record of 10-21-4 for a winning percentage of .343. The last time a BU team fared worse than that, it was two years prior to when legendary coach Jack Parker started his playing career for the Terriers.

How good was this year's edition of the Terriers? Despite being the youngest team in college hockey, they ended up with a winning percentage of .743, better than any other Terrier squad since 1998 with the exception of the 2009 national champions. They won the team's first significant hardware since that epic season as well, winning the Beanpot as well as the Hockey East championship.

To the average fan, it seems like an overnight rebound from a trying campaign. But the Terriers' great success this year was the culmination of hundreds of hours of recruiting trips and early-morning workouts, cliffhanger wins and character-building losses. 1n 2009, that spirit was captured with t-shirts that read "Burn the Boats." This year, the shirts had an ever simpler adage: "Never Again."

The team vowed that last year's record would be an aberration, that they would never again such a dismal showing. They would not allow themselves to be outworked on the ice or off of it. They knew they would be much better, but did they really believe that they would not only win two major championships and be playing for a national title? That depends who you ask.

"Actually, yeah, I believed it," Moran said. "Guys in the room believed. As you said, we vowed to never again have a season like that and put BU hockey back on the map."

"Not in my wildest dreams did I ever think I was going to get here," said senior Cason Hohmann, one of the last players remaining in uniform a half-hour after the game. "I love this team. I love every guy in this locker room. Last year was terrible. We really made an effort this year to be close to one another and care about each other."

Right up until the final game of the college hockey season, this year's Terriers were defined repeatedly by two characteristics. In some games, they piled up goals in third period in the same way that the cartoon version of the Harlem Globetrotters piled up points late in every game to win. In one game against UMass, for example, they trailed 5-4 with less than ten minutes to play and then buried five goals in less than seven minutes to win going away, 9-5.

And when that didn't happen, when the wins were more of the white-knuckle variety, the theme was finding a way to win. In the Beanpot championship, that meant letting a surefire two-goal lead slip away, only to have captain Matt Grzelcyk end up with a targeted wrister during a power play in overtime. The Frozen Four semifinals were similar, as a 4-1 lead in an uneventful third period suddenly became a slim 4-3 edge with 3:43 remaining. In both cases, with opposing fans roaring, the young BU team held its ground and came out on top.

Tight games were more the rule than the exception for much of the year. BU won six overtime games this season and only lost one. The only easy win in a high-stakes game was a comfortable 5-3 win over UMass Lowell in the Hockey East championship. Otherwise, it was never easy. In the NCAA Regionals, they had to go to overtime to beat the nation's best defensive team in Yale, and their 3-2 win over Minnesota-Duluth in the Northeast Regional Final was in doubt until the final buzzer.

In the biggest games, the margin between winning and losing grew thin. What made the difference? First off, it was the rock-solid goaltending of Matt O'Connor, arguably the most underrated player on the team. Often overlooked because of the offensive pyrotechnics of Eichel, Evan Rodrigues, Danny O'Regan and a host of others, O'Connor was the reason why many games were 0-0 or 1-1 after the first period instead of 2-0 or 3-0.

That's what made the game-tying goal on Saturday such a stunner. It was such a rarity for O'Connor, who has garnered all kinds of interest from NHL teams this season as a possible free-agent signee.

When the final buzzer sounded, O'Connor looked inconsolable, and backup goaltender Anthony Moccia showed great leadership by consoling him and other teammates after a devastating defeat. "I just said, `We've got your back, and I love you. You're my best friend, and I'm so proud of you. You're the reason we're here, and don't sweat it.' I just feel terrible. It's tough as a goalie. We take everything to heart and blame ourselves, and it's hard to see my best friend upset like that."

Likewise, every teammate wanted to own the responsibility for the loss, and nobody was about to pin it on their stalwart goaltender. After Quinn aggressively pulled the goalie with about 1:50 remaining, BU had one terrific chance near the net. Hohmann envisioned himself putting the puck around Friar goalie Jon Gillies, only to lose an edge and the handle. Nick Roberto said, "I lost the game for us" because his last-ditch whack didn't go in. But the prevailing sentiment was that it was a team loss and that the team would be well into its offseason if not for the play of O'Connor.

As Hohmann said, "He came up to me after the game and apologized, and I told him, `We wouldn't have even come close to this if you weren't a stud goalie.' He bleeds scarlet. He's a Terrier for life and one of my best friends. You can't put this game on him. It's a tough loss."

"OC's really the only reason why we're [in the Frozen Four]," Moran said. "He's bailed us out plenty of times this year, almost in every game. Without him, we're not even sitting here in the Garden in the national championship game against Providence. What happened isn't his fault at all. We lost that game as a team, and we won games as a team this year."

Another reason the Terriers were so great this year was depth. Last year, freshman Robbie Baillargeon led the team in scoring. This year he missed most of the first half of the year due to mononucleosis and ended up on the third line. Roberto played regularly on the second line and was the team's fourth-leading scorer. This year he played on the third and fourth line. With highly talented players like Baillargeon and Roberto as well as Matt Lane and Moran among others on the third lines, BU often had the upper hand with all of its forwards as well as with the more acclaimed top two lines.

For that matter, three players who played over 30 games each in last year's lineup were healthy scratches for much of this year, playing a total of just eight games combined all season. That's no knock on them, just a reflection of the influx of talent as well as the fact that only two players -- Baillargeon and Nikolas Olsson -- missed significant amounts of game action due to injuries.

That depth also had one especially unusual consequence. Last year Ahti Oksanen was a regular defenseman on the team. With four talented freshman defensmen donning the scarlet and white this season, Quinn informed the Finnish junior that he would be a forward, going forward. Oksanen hated the idea but warmed up to it when Eichel teed him for four goals in the team's first exhibition game. He never looked back and ended up second only to Eichel himself in goals scored this season.

Perhaps the most memorable factor was how well the team played in third periods and in overtime. Before Saturday, BU outscored teams by an eye-popping 69-27 margin in third periods this season, and that differential becomes a 75-28 edge if you add overtimes. No wonder the team owned a 6-1-5 record in games in which playing a full 60 minutes didn't settle it.

> What made the team so successful down the stretch of games? It was probably a combination of intense summer conditioning, a big will to win, and perhaps just a superior skill level wearing down the opposition.

Yet those third-period stats were another reason why Saturday's outcome was such a shocker. "Tough way to lose," Rodrigues said. "It seemed like we were in a good position, and we've been a third-period team all year. We just let it slip away."

One thing that is not likely to slip away anytime soon is this program's place in the national rankings. Right now it's presumed but not definite that Eichel and O'Connor will go pro early, and Hohmann and Rodrigues are done after growing from two-goal scorers as freshmen into outstanding players over their four-year careers. Rodrigues was the hottest scorer in college hockey after being added to the top line in early January, leading to a very Happy New Year for him and the Terriers. But the youngest team in college hockey will get a little older and is already slated to add a smaller but stellar crop of incoming freshmen. "Guys who are coming back will carry this team," Rodrigues said. "Quinny's in the process of building a dynasty here at BU."

The legacy of the 2014-15 team will be debated for years to come. Some will remember this title as the one that got away, but it can just as easily be viewed as a year in which the team assembled an incredible puzzle that had everything except the very last piece.

What if they had won the title? It's hard to compare teams of different eras. While many have mentioned parallels to the 2009 champions, there are some critical distinctions. That team had a freshman goaltender and a fairly experienced lineup, while this year's Beanpot and Hockey East champs were a young team with a mature goalie and a ton of freshmen along with a few crucial veterans.

The 2009 champs had also had six defensemen who ended up playing in the NHL, and only one -- David Warsofsky -- was a freshman. Four of the team's top six scorers were seniors, and their Hobey Baker winner, Matt Gilroy, was almost 25 years old compared to Eichel being not quite 18 and a half. This year you also had a coach going into his second year instead of his 36th year at the helm as Jack Parker did in 2008-09.

Comparisons to earlier BU championship teams are even harder to make. There is so much more parity in college hockey today. The talent is spread out over dozens of teams instead of a handful, and it's no longer so surprising to see the lowest-seeded teams in the national tournament make it to the Frozen Four.

Minnesota made the Frozen Four for four years straight in the 1980s, and Michigan did so in the 1990s. Boston College pulled the same feat around the turn of the century and BU managed to do it five years in a row in the 1990s, blowing out many a team in the process.

Will we see domination like that once more? It's safe to say never again.

But for that matter, when will Boston University have another freshman who wins the Hobey Baker Award a few months after he became old enough to vote, going on to be a top two pick in the NHL draft? When will the Terriers convert a defenseman into a forward and have him immediately emerge as one of the team's top goal scorers? When will you see the youngest team in college hockey -- a team with only two seniors playing night in, night out -- not only win a league championship but get to the Frozen Four and come this close to winning it all? And when will you have so much high-stakes drama unfold just a short subway ride from where the team vowed last summer that everything was about to change?

The answer is just as obvious as the words that the Terriers wore on their t-shirts during those brutal early-morning workouts last summer.

Never again.