The question posed to Northeastern coach Greg Cronin seemed innocent and straightforward enough. His team just beat Harvard, 4-0, to advance to the Beanpot final next Monday and a chance to end 23 years of frustration in the annual February Boston tournament.

So, what would it mean to finally win the Beanpot with a win on Feb. 14?

“It is funny you ask that question because I was thinking about two years ago in the final, and talk about goofy plays, pucks bouncing up in the air,” Cronin began. “The BU-Northeastern game was a great game. BU scores three shorthanded goals and a power play goal. That just doesn’t happen in the Beanpot. We end up losing that game. Last year, we played a terrific game against BU in the first round. Again [Alex] Chaisson shoots the puck and it squeaks through the shirt and trickles into the net, just as [Mike] McLaughlin’s did. Unfortunately, those are the memories for a lot of the Northeastern people over the last twenty years…near misses.”

Then it got interesting.

“I will give you an example,” Cronin said in an effort to back up his comments about years of frustration. “When I got here six years ago, the program was… well it just needed a lot of work form inter-structurally and in addition to me getting the fans back. The fans come in when you win, so we have started to win incrementally. We started to fill the building and last year we had good crowds. Now this year, they have stopped showing up and I think you see a reflection of of the fans when you are on the bench and you look into that left corner, and there wasn’t nearly as many black shirts as there was a year ago.”

Well, you can understand a coach reaching out to his student body and imploring them to support their team through good times and bad. After all, Cronin knows his team is a still-disappointing 9-11-6 after having much bigger aspirations entering this season.

But then he finished with a bang. Or a thud, if you’re a Red Sox fan.

“I am not a baseball fan,” Cronin said. “Believe it or not, I like the Yankees over the Red Sox, don’t kill me now. But I liked the Yankees because they would always win and the Red Sox would lose. I think we have a little bit of the mentality of when are they going to win this damn thing. And they get sick of it and I don’t blame them.

“But, this is twice in the last three years that we are in the final, and I know we are going to have a tremendous opponent to play against. So to answer you are question with a period, they would have to get both the NUPD and the Boston police on our campus if we won.”

The police might actually be more useful for Cronin the next time he shows his face at Fenway.

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