BOSTON – With a new-look Northeastern team taking the ice after an underwhelming season last year, the Huskies faced a litmus test of an opening matchup against the Holy Cross Crusaders Saturday night.
And all in all, Northeastern’s outcome was a positive one. They secured a 6-4 victory to open the final season of historic Matthews Arena in front of a jam-packed DogHouse, with flashes of brilliance up and down the lines both offensively and defensively.
The 2025-2026 season marks the second in a row where the Huskies have had massive amounts of turnover on their roster. Last year, the team brought in 15 new faces, just one more than this year’s number of 14. And out of the 19 skaters that took the ice Saturday, 10 of them were donning a Northeastern jersey for the first time, with six of the 10 taking their first-ever shifts of collegiate hockey.
With Hockey East as strong as it has ever been, it will be crucial for the new roster to work out the kinks in its play that materialize before conference matchups begin.
Here are some thoughts on the good, the bad, and the ugly from the season opener:
1. Joe Connor, Dylan Hryckowian, and Matthew Perkins are ready to lead an offense.
With the departure of star scorers Jack Williams and Cam Lund, Northeastern has some very big shoes to fill.
And, in typical Northeastern fashion, the team succeeds when its best players succeed.
This season, head coach Jerry Keefe will look to two returners, junior Dylan Hryckowian and sophomore Joe Connor, and a veteran transfer, junior Matthew Perkins —who comes to the Huskies after two seasons at Minnesota-Duluth — to spearhead his offense. And that they did.
Of the six goals scored by Northeastern, the top line was responsible for four of them.
After falling behind by a goal early in the first period, Hryckowian, the extra skater following a delayed penalty, sniped a sharp-angle shot off the back of Crusaders senior goaltender Loudon Hogg to equalize the game.
Later in the period, a scuffle in front of the net left Perkins with a loose rebound and a wide-open lane to power the puck into the goal for Northeastern’s third goal of the game, with Connor tallying an assist on the play.
Connor now stands as the leading scorer for the Huskies, notching that assist alongside the two goals he scored in the game as well.
Connor’s first came in the second period off an assist from transfer forward Tyler Fukakusa. The junior out of RIT carried the puck in deep from the blue line and dropped it back to a trailing Connor, who found the tight lane to score. His second was generated from a massive joint effort on the forecheck alongside linemate Hryckowian in the third period.
“[We’re] connecting great, just flying around out there,” Connor said after the game. “I don’t think many people are gonna be able to stop me and [Hryckowian’s] speed.”
It’s clear that this Huskies top line is ready to take the team’s offense into their own hands. In every situation on the ice, they were fast, their passes had pinpoint accuracy, and they brought a relentless pace that the offense fed off of from the top down. Speed had been a priority of Northeastern’s in the offseason, and that decision looks to be a strong one, with Connor, Hryckowian, and Perkins outpacing their opponents every shift.
“I think [Hryckowian] and [Connor] are returning players that we think can be elite players in Hockey East,” Keefe said. “I like Perkins’ speed, I like his complete game too. He plays a mature game. We’re gonna need those guys to be good. You need your top offensive guys to score to have success.”
There was a level of confidence on the ice from the Huskies’ offense, and it started with the top line setting the tone, with the rest of the team matching their energy. If Saturday’s game is anything to go off of, this has the potential to be a high-flying scoring season for Northeastern, with the first line leading the charge.
2. The freshmen on the roster rose to the occasion in their first game.
The young faces on Northeastern had a fantastic introduction to collegiate hockey.
Keefe opted for a second line made up entirely of freshmen, with wingers Giacomo Martino and Amine Hajibi centered by Jacob Mathieu. It wasn’t necessarily the prettiest game played, but both Martino and Mathieu were able to find the back of the net, the only goal scorers on the team not on the first line.
Martino’s goal was the one to give Northeastern its first lead of the game, one they would maintain until its finish. It came on the power play in the first period, a stark positive change with the Huskies’ power play last season ranking fourth-worst in the nation at a 13.7% clip.
Mathieu’s score came on an empty net effort in the waning moments of the game, but regardless of the context of the goal, the freshman getting involved in the offense is a pleasant sight.
Joining the second line on offense was Jack Pechar, who didn’t necessarily see his name in the box score, but played very respectably, ending the game with a team-high plus-minus of three.
And on the defensive side, Dylan Compton had a stalwart first effort paired alongside sophomore Jack Henry that won’t show up on paper, but will be a great starting point for the lone youth pairing in a veteran defensive corps.
Regardless of the results of the team, though, Keefe is not letting up on his rookies. They played well, but not flawlessly, and it will still take time for them to get used to the intensity of college play.
“I think young players, when they come in, they don’t realize how hard it is right away,” Keefe said. “I think we were a little bit on our heels at times tonight. They’re elite players, you know, and they’re freshmen, right? So there’s gonna be some learning curves… They still created some chances. So [we] just gotta keep working with those guys and focus on the details of the game.”
The pressure on the freshmen to perform at a higher level is definitely there, as they are expected to plug some large holes in the roster, but the high-octane performance against Holy Cross was a perfect first matchup in what started as a successful season for the Huskies’ freshman class.
3. Special teams have taken a massive step forward.
Last year, Northeastern’s special teams were a plague on the team’s success. They were in the bottom half of the country with a penalty kill conversion rate of just 78.6%, and the aforementioned lackluster power play gave the Huskies’ offense very little assistance.
Saturday proved to be a major change from a season ago.
With Hryckowian scoring on a six-on-five man advantage for a delayed penalty and Martino’s goal coming from a power play 10 minutes later, the first two Northeastern goals of the game were from special teams.
And while they did not capitalize on the four other power play chances they had throughout the game, there were plenty of positive signs to take away.
The top power play unit consisted of Hryckowian, Connor, Martino, and senior defenders Vinny Borgesi and Joaquim Lemay. All game, they had plenty of reps maintaining offensive zone time, cycling the puck well. They kept the Holy Cross penalty kill, which ranked first in the nation last year with a staggering 90.5% conversion percentage, on edge, and generated some dangerous shot opportunities.
On the other side, Northeastern’s penalty kill performed admirably as well, killing off all five chances they had. They dominated possession and put up a great effort in limiting the Crusaders’ power play, which ranked in the top 10 nationally last season.
Whereas last season, every time special teams would come into play, the Huskies faltered, Saturday’s game painted a different picture. It was a strength of the team, not a weakness, and success in both the power play and penalty kill will be crucial if Northeastern wants to compete with the best this year.
4. Every time Northeastern gave a goal up, they answered back.
Holy Cross scored four goals over the course of the game.
The longest it took for Northeastern to respond with a goal of their own was five minutes.
The shortest? 23 seconds.
Considering there were very few games last season where Northeastern was able to stave off a threatening opponent and respond to goals scored against them accordingly, this was a very positive sign of the way this team can respond to adversity.
The Huskies had the lowest goals per game in Hockey East last season, with struggles primarily stemming from the lack of scoring efforts near the crease. The shot chart Saturday told a very different story, with dots scattered all around the point-blank area right on the doorstep of the goal.
And with the third period featuring more than double the amount of shots that they had in the first or second frames, Northeastern did a good job of not resting on its laurels offensively. They continued to pressure the Holy Cross defense until the waning moments of the game.
While it was not ideal for the Huskies to continue letting the Crusaders hang around, Northeastern junior goalie Lawton Zacher’s spirits will be boosted knowing that offensively, the Huskies looked successful when bouncing back from giving up a goal.
“We’ve got to do a better job locking it down in front of [Zacher],” Keefe said. “You want to be going into the third period with two-goal leads, and we’ve got to learn how to manage the game better in front of him.”
Overall, the game was by no means played perfectly. Mistakes were made, Northeastern took some messy penalties, and with tensions flaring high, the game ended in a chaotic sequence with six game misconducts issued between both teams in the final six seconds of regulation.
However, following an underwhelming season last year, the Huskies had hoped to come out of the gate proving that they would be able to hang with the ever-improving Hockey East in their final year in a 115-year-old Matthews Arena, and there are plenty of positives to build off of from this matchup.
“There’s a lot we gotta work on, and we’ll look at that,” Keefe said. “We did some good things in the game, too… But we’ve got to clean some things up, first game of the year. It’s always nice when you don’t play perfect and you find a way to win.”
Northeastern will need to maintain its strengths and patch up its weaknesses, but with one more non-conference opponent in Army next week before their first Hockey East game, the Huskies will have another chance to continue to develop this new-look roster. Game one looked promising, and time will tell if this success is sustainable.
Northeastern will host Army next Friday, October 10, at 7 p.m. Daisy Roberts, Luke Graham, and Jacob Phillips will have the call on WRBB Sports.
Daisy Roberts is a hockey, basketball, and baseball broadcaster and writer for WRBB Sports. She has been covering Northeastern Athletics for five years. You can read her content here and follow her on X here.