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		That (Not Quite) Championship Season Despite postseason disappointment, Husky football set records, won hearts. By Paul Perillo As the Northeastern football squad made its way out of Parsons Field for the final time last fall, the players looked down at the ground while the huge crowd stood mostly silent. “Keep your heads up,” one fan shouted. “You’re all winners to us.” The sentiment rang true. No team in NU football’s sixty-seven-year history had accomplished more than coach Don Brown’s troops did: winning ten games, gaining a share of the Atlantic 10 title, and qualifying for the Division 1-AA playoffs. Northeastern had never made it to the postseason before, had never even been in contention for a league title since joining the A-10 in 1993. So as the players left after the bitterly disappointing 29-24 loss to Fordham in the first round of the playoffs, some of the Huskies faithful stayed behind to offer encouragement to a team that surely felt it was leaving some unfinished business behind. Back in July, before a single football had been snapped, experts had the Huskies tabbed for tenth place in the eleven-team league. “We knew during spring practice that we were going to be pretty good,” says Brown, looking back on the milestone season, his third at NU. “We came into camp pretty confident. But we needed to prove to ourselves that we were for real.” The season’s first four weeks went a long way toward accomplishing that. After an easy win over Lock Haven in the opener, the Huskies traveled to play Division 1-A’s Ohio University. Most Atlantic 10 schools venture occasionally into the land of the big boys to gauge themselves against the elite; few have much success. When Northeastern returned to campus with a thoroughly dominant 31-0 win, the players were convinced that their time was now. Next came UMass. The Huskies broke a sixteen-game losing streak against the Minutemen, coasting to a 42-17 victory behind a suffocating playmaking defense that returned a pair of interceptions for touchdowns. “We live on the edge a little bit,” Brown says of his blitzing defense. “We gamble that we’re going to make more plays than the opposition. We try to force them into mistakes, and when we’re successful, we’re an awfully tough team to beat.” After defeating Hofstra for a 4-0 start, the Huskies traveled to Delaware—and lost. Undeterred, the team rebounded with an easy win at home over Rhode Island, then escaped with a 17-14 victory at Harvard. NU’s first-ever conquest of the Crimson came dramatically in the final seconds as third-team AP All-America defensive end Steve Anzalone recovered a fumble inside the Huskies’ 5-yard line to preserve the win. Anzalone, one of only ten departing seniors on the team, leaves with notable accomplishments: He finished second on the school’s all-time sack list, with 26, and joined running back Tim Gale, offensive lineman John McDonald, kicker Miro Kesic, and defensive mates Liam Ezekiel and Art Smith on the All-Atlantic 10 first team. (Another Anzalone waits in the wings: Brother Jason, a senior at Weymouth [Mass.] High School, has agreed to play Husky football in the fall.) NU lost one more regular-season match, at William and Mary, where the Huskies played most of the game without starting quarterback Shawn Brady. “That game took a lot out of us,” says Brown, who would earn Atlantic 10, New England Football Writers Association, and American Football Coaches Association 1-AA Region I coach of the year honors. “But it was the turning point of the season.” The players knew if they didn’t win their remaining four games, they might not earn a playoff berth. The final phase began with perhaps the most dramatic finish in school history, when Kesic, a freshman, boomed a 57-yard field goal as the clock ran out to beat Richmond. NU followed up with blowout wins over Villanova, New Hampshire, and James Madison, to close the regular season at 10-2. Along the way, the Huskies achieved their highest-ever national rankings (number seven in the ESPN/USA Today poll, number eight in the Sports Network poll). In addition to the six players named to the all-conference first team, four others were named to the second or third team. Ezekiel, just a sophomore, attracted third team Sports Network All-America honors. Though the Fordham loss brought a bittersweet end to an otherwise magical season, Brown sees plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the future. “Our success caught a lot of people by surprise,” he says. “But the nice thing was the crowds just kept getting bigger every week. We have plenty of talent coming back, and we’re bringing in some pretty good players, too. “We’ve told the kids to enjoy what they’ve done, but not be satisfied with it.” On the trail of a smoking Gunn Growing up in Southern California, Chanda Gunn didn’t put playing ice hockey at the top of her priority list. But after watching her younger brother, Jake, skate up and down the ice, she suddenly felt the urge to give it a try. “Really, it was perfect timing,” Gunn says, remembering her modest beginnings in the sport. “Right around the time I was getting into it, they started a girls’ program with holiday tournaments. I played mostly on boys’ teams in California, but those tournaments with the girls were a lot of fun. It never crossed my mind that I could go to college and play until I started getting letters [from coaches] and it became an option.” No mystery there: Become one of the finest women goaltenders in the country, and colleges will want to acquire your services. Despite her abilities, Gunn was taken aback by all the attention. After fielding offers from the likes of Princeton, New Hampshire, and Northeastern, she decided on Wisconsin, playing for the Badgers as a freshman in 1999. But her career in Madison lasted just seven games before she was forced to sit out as a medical redshirt. Though Gunn has lived with epilepsy all her twenty-three years, her condition had never affected her on-ice performance. Now undergraduate life was taking its toll. “I was like most people who go to college,” Gunn says. “I was staying up later and eating differently than I had before. My body composition was changing. All those things affected the medications I was using. I wasn’t able to play, and [Wisconsin officials] weren’t very accommodating about my situation.” Wisconsin may not have wanted to deal with Gunn’s medical problems, but at Northeastern then coach Heather Linstad had no such reservations. Linstad told Gunn that if she qualified for a transfer and got her paperwork together, there would be a place for her at NU. Three years later, Gunn is perhaps the best goalie in the country. After playing sparingly behind All-American Erika Silva her first season, Gunn enjoyed a breakout campaign last year as a sophomore. She was named second team All-American, second team Eastern College Athletic Conference Eastern All-Conference, and one of ten finalists for the Patty Kazmaier Award, given to the player of the year in women’s college hockey (another Husky, Brooke Whitney, won last year). Coach Joy Woog, who replaced Linstad at the beginning of the 2000–2001 season, had an easy time filling out her starting lineup last year. Gunn started thirty-one games and established school bests in wins, with 23, and saves, with a .950 mark. Despite the heavy workload, she finished with 1.37 goals against average. Perhaps most impressively, Gunn allowed just one goal in three postseason games—a 4-0 quarterfinals win over Boston College, a 2-0 semifinals win over New Hampshire, and a 0-1 loss to Providence in the final. In December, Gunn and teammate Brooke White spent time with the U.S. National team, coached by former NU men’s coach Ben Smith, before returning to the Huskies after the holiday break. Gunn says she hopes to further her career at the Olympic level when the time comes. Until then, she’s content to backstop the Huskies to as many wins as the team can muster (by the middle of February, the team had gone 9-17-2). “Northeastern is a really good fit for me,” says Gunn, an athletic training major. “Nowhere else could I get my clinical hours and play hockey full time like I can here, with co-op. I can’t imagine playing anywhere else.”