Your mother told you the day you unpacked the station wagon outside the dorm in the Yard that these would be the greatest years of your life, so enjoy them.

And if you went to the Beanpot hockey tournament, if you grabbed everything that those first two Mondays in February offered, you found out that Mom was right once again.

The Beanpot. It almost seems as if the event itself has a kind of power of attorney, entering its games as "Exhibit A" in defense of the unique, the spontaneous, the exciting.

But you don't experience the Beanpot if you're a student at Harvard, Boston University Boston College or Northeastern--you grow with it. It is both a microcosm of what sports are and can be, and an ongoing life-cycle of one's collegiate stay.

What happens in the Boston Garden on those first two Mondays in February may well be the only athletic event where the participants and the spectators share all the intangibles.

Here is one onlooker's four-year term with the Beanpot.

February, 1976: Intrigue and Vulnerability--I'd been to the Garden a hundred times before, but you never really know your way around the Causeway Street relic that one writer called "The Sporting Louvre."

There was always some new obstructed seat that you didn't know about, some rattier looking guy outside who you bought peanuts from because you felt sorry for him.

I was a Harvard freshman and a Beanpot freshman. I went because I liked hockey and "everybody went," but I was so skeptical and unsure that I brought some notes for a Government exam in case things got boring.

They didn't. You'd look around, and it seemed like EVERYBODY but the people next to you were rooting against Harvard. Huh? I thought we were always the good guys. Who the hell was B.U. anyway, with that inane "Dum da dum da-da da da, dum da dum, da-da da-da...." chant?

I began to sense what I was up against, and the challenge fueled my interest. Suddenly, what was going on out on the ice--Harvard-B.U., a shot at the finals, bragging rights to the city of Boston, all that traditional Brahmin hype--was important and real.

Harvard lost to B.U. in the opening round, 6-5, when Mike Fidler's gently rolling shot somehow conjured its way past Brian Petrovek. One week later, Harvard beat Northeastern in the consolation, 4-2, and freshman goalie Paul Skidmore led Boston College in a 5-3 upset of the Terriers, but I wasn't there. I was too busy trying to reconcile the simultaneous allure and disappointment of my first Beanpot with a non-honors grade in the Government exam. Typical freshman.

February, 1977: Euphoria--There seemed to be a little more pre-Beanpot thought now that fancy had become ritual. I tried to characterize the participants. Boston University, traditional collegiate hockey power, was The Revered. Boston College, whose blown-dry kiss-me-I'm-Irish throng would fill half the seats in the Garden (the three remaining schools took the other half) was The Beloved. Northeastern, the commuter school on Huntington Ave. that never seemed to park itself in the 9:00 pm finals, had a Sports Information Director known as Jack "6:00" Grinold. The Huskies were The Damned.

Obviously, Harvard was regarded as The Scorned Elite. They had the rest of the world, people figured, so why give them the hockey rights to Boston?

And though nobody was ever handed anything at the Beanpot (with the exception of B.U., who danced around Northeastern in the first round that year, 7-2), occasionally a team would rise above the labels that people like myself were always writing.