The picture hangs on the wall of their DeWolfe double, a daily reminder of how long juniors Noah Welch and Ryan Lannon have shared a blue line.

It’s a photograph of the Boston Selects, an all-star collection of nine-year-olds that are mostly grinning broadly, still too young to know that hockey players aren’t supposed to look adorable. And right in the middle, standing three feet from each other in the back row, are Harvard defensemen Welch and Lannon.

People usually have to work to find Welch, the biggest kid on the team who still had most of his baby fat in elementary school. But everyone that looks at the photo can pick out Lannon right away, the kid with the soft blond spikes and baby face.

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” Lannon says with a self-deprecating chuckle. “I’ve had the same haircut since I was eight.”

That’s not all that hasn’t changed. Even before the Boston Selects, Welch and Lannon were friends.

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It all started with the Minutemen Flames, an eight-year old travel team based out of Marlborough, Mass., where Welch and Lannon met at tryouts.

“I was kind of nervous,” Welch says when asked to describe his first memory of his roommate. “It was a travel team, and when you’re young, it’s a big deal. Ryan was definitely one of the better defensemen back then, and I was just, like, big. I used to kill kids if they’d get within a foot of me, but besides that I couldn’t catch them.”

Still, both players made the team and were immediately made defensive partners. Soon after, they became buddies, too, forcing their parents to drive them the 40 minutes between Welch’s Brighton home and Lannon’s house in Grafton.

They had sleepovers almost every weekend.

“He used to sleep over at my house all the time, and honestly he could eat more than anybody I’d ever known,” Lannon says, sounding impressed more than anything. “He was out-eating my father when he was like nine. It was hilarious.”

After two years with the Minutemen, Welch was cut, and he switched over to the Boston University Junior Terriers, a squad much closer to home. Half a season later—much to Welch’s delight—Lannon followed.

“He, literally, used to just dominate,” Welch says. “So he used to do all the work and all the skating part, and I’d just bootie-bump people in the D zone.”

But the duo was once again split up.

“Then I got cut from the Terriers, too,” Welch says, shaking his head and laughing so hard he can hardly talk. “So I joined the BC Junior Eagles which was the worst team ever. Our goalie had like one eye. I kind of ruined us playing together.”