One week ago, Noah Welch addressed the Beanpot Press Luncheon crowd in a suit and a tie. And as much press as the 109th captain of Harvard hockey has gotten over the course of his career, he couldn’t quite mask the childish excitement in his voice.

Welch is a second-round NHL draft pick, one widely touted as one of the best two-way defensemen college hockey has to offer—but he is also a Brighton native, a skater who took in his first Beanpot as a seven-year-old in the erstwhile Boston Garden, and he has wanted that tournament trophy ever since.

“If we were [pretending to be] pro guys,” he said of his street-hockey youth, “we were going to be playing for the Stanley Cup. If we were college guys, we were going to be playing for the Beanpot.”

It’s a sentiment surely shared on a Crimson squad that boasts seven Massachusetts natives. For them, the Boston College-Boston University-Harvard-Northeastern shuffle isn’t a tournament—it is the tournament.

“The excitement when you win it is secondary to everything else,” explained Boston College coach Jerry York, originally from Watertown, who has won two Beanpots at the helm of the Eagles program and one as a player, in 1965. “It’s the be-all-and-end-all.”

And York isn’t the only one to say so.

Welch was not alone in remarking that growing up, he was entirely unaware of the existence of an NCAA title. Instead, it was this Boston tournament, the perennial occupant of February’s first two Mondays, to which he looked.

It is a Beantown institution, one steeped in more than five decades of tradition and one bestowing upon its annual winner a sense of history that accompanies no other event.

Somerville product Jack Parker has earned 17 Beanpot titles as coach of Boston University, and he deems the tournament a “highlight of the college hockey season,” explaining much of the drama is the result of the setup: “It’s the local guys against each other.”

Of the 104 skaters that fill the four rosters this year, one of every three hails from the state of Massachusetts. More than 40 percent of the group was born in New England, and another sizeable chunk of the players attended New England high schools to play hockey.

And if ice hockey is an acquired taste, a regional sport that is slowly suffering in the warmer sections of the United States, then the Beanpot at least demonstrates the continuing passion Boston has for the game.

“I don’t think you can really, fully appreciate what it means to all the local guys,” said Crimson goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris, who grew up in Illinois, explaining that in this, his senior year and fourth chance in the tournament, “I definitely understand it a little more.”

And then there is that one thing that Grumet-Morris and his teammates—be they southern or northern or Midwestern or Canadian—all understand perfectly clearly: Harvard has not won the Beanpot Trophy since 1993.

In fact, the program hasn’t even made the finals since 1998, and so not one current Crimson skater has ever experienced anything but a first-round Beanpot loss.

Harvard has traditionally faltered in the 53-year history of the tournament, posting a .442 win percentage that ranks third of the four teams. Northeastern, the least storied of the college quartet, sits at the bottom with a .389 record, while Boston College is a solid .567 and Boston University a dominant .712.