ALBANY, N.Y. – When Boston College upset Boston University 5-0 Saturday night in the Northeast Regional final at the Worcester (Mass.) Centrum, it was the sixth time the two archrivals had met this season.

Marty Scarano, the chairman of the NCAA Ice Hockey Tournament’s selection committee, said “in another year, you probably wouldn’t have the two at the same site together [if they had already played five times].”

But he said if they had kept them apart this year, it would have created a snowball effect that would have altered what he considered to be “as perfect a scenario as we were going to get.”

A perfect scenario, he explained, would have the No. 1 seed playing the No. 16 seed; the No. 2 seed facing the No. 15 seed and so on.

That bracketing is usually disrupted by the NCAA’s desire to keep teams from the same conference away from playing each other in the first round and the awarding of host-site bids.

Boston University (Northeast), North Dakota (West) and Wisconsin (Midwest) were the host schools for regionals this season and, since all three made the tournament, they were sent to their host sites.

“It may never happen this way again. There were no intra-conference conflicts and no problems with the host school venues and those are the two things that usually raise their ugly heads,” said Scarano.

The only change was Miami (Ohio) and Cornell were flip-flopped with Cornell being sent to the Wisconsin Regional and Miami coming to the Worcester Regional, he said.

He said after the committee was done with the 1-through-16 bracketing, it spent more time looking at its fallibility.

“We said, OK, what about Denver? What about St. Cloud State?”, said Scarano.

But he pointed out that George Gwozdecky, coach of the defending two-time NCAA champion Denver Pioneers, said he liked the system and agreed with the decision to leave his team out of the tournament field.

Denver lost in the WCHA quarterfinals after an up-and-down regular season.

Scarano, the athletic director at the University of New Hampshire, said “you’re never going to make everybody happy” but he likes the system which takes into consideration the PairWise Rankings, the Rating Percentage Index, bonus points and a different program privy only to the NCAA selection committee.

It is a highly quantified formula that “breaks things down to a 100th of a decimal point,” said Scarano.

Although he is a proponent of the system, Scarano said he “never wants to see it become just a mathematical equation.” By the same token, he warns, “if you add subjectivity into it, you open yourself up to a lot of interpretation.”

The NCAA Division I basketball tournament has one play-in game between the Nos. 64 and 65 seeds for the last spot in the tournament and Scarano is intrigued by the possibility of having the Nos. 16 and 17 seeds in the NCAA Hockey Tournament field have a play-in game.

But the NCAA has a equation based on number of teams allowed to participate in the tournament in relation to the number of teams with a varsity program and a 17th team may be out of the realm of possibility.

It was believed if St. Cloud State had upset North Dakota in the WCHA final, Maine would have been the odd team out and would have missed the tournament.

Scarano disagreed.

“I think Maine would have been in. Nebraska-Omaha or New Hampshire probably would have been out,” he said.

Next’s year’s regionals will be in Manchester, N.H., Rochester, N.Y., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Denver. The Frozen Four will be in St. Louis.

In 2008, the regional sites will be Albany, Worcester, Madison, Wis., and Colorado Springs, Colo., with the Frozen Four being held in Denver.

The 2009 regionals will be in Bridgeport, Conn., Manchester, Grand Rapids and Minneapolis with the Frozen Four being held in Washington, D.C.

Albany and Worcester regain regionals in 2010 but the west regionals have yet to be determined.

The Frozen Fours will be in Detroit (2010) at Ford Field where the NFL’s Lions play; St. Paul, Minn. (2011) and Tampa, Fla. (2012).

Piotrowski no stranger to Maine

Maine fans were familiar with the referee for the Bears’ 6-1 win over Harvard: CCHA referee Steve Piotrowski.

Piotrowski ejected the late Shawn Walsh from his last game in 2001, a 3-1 loss to eventual national champ Boston College, after Walsh berated him for two penalty calls that gave BC a two-man advantage which enabled the Eagles to score the clinching goal on the ensuing one-man advantage.

Walsh died the following Sept. 24 of complications from kidney cancer.

The following year, Piotrowski officiated the NCAA final, Maine’s 4-3 overtime loss to Minnesota in Saint Paul. A tripping penalty called by Piotrowski on Mike Schutte in overtime gave the Gophers a power play on which they scored the game-winner.

A penalty many Maine fans felt should have been called would have been on the Minnesota goalie Adam Hauser for interfering with Todd Jackson on that penalty kill.

But there was nothing controversial in the Harvard game and, in fact, Maine had seven power plays to Harvard’s four.