A nearly 40-year losing streak ended on Tuesday night in Boston

Pembroke’s Sammy Davis, a junior captain who missed all of last season due to injury, roofed a shot over the shoulder of Harvard’s Lindsay Reed at 13:28 in overtime on Tuesday night, winning the 41st Women’s Beanpot tournament for Boston University, 3-2, and ending a championship drought that began 16 years before she was born.

It began before all three BU assistant coaches were born, as well.

The drought began during the first season of head coach Brian Durocher’s now 40-year coaching career, when, on Feb. 20, 1981, at the then called Northeastern Arena — it wouldn’t be rechristened Matthews Arena until the next year — the Terriers shut out Boston College, 4-0, to win the third-ever Women’s Beanpot tournament as a club team.

Until Tuesday, that is.

In the ’80s, women’s hockey was in its infancy. The first women’s ECAC Hockey tournament wasn’t held until 1983-84, with Northeastern being the first Boston school to win in 1988. The first true national championship took place in 1997-98, with the NCAA sanctioning the modern event during the 2000-01 season. It was just a four-team tournament until 2005 when it expanded to the eight-team field it remains today.

The addition of a Women’s Beanpot was reasonably revolutionary, occurring not long after the Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women recognized women’s ice hockey as a university sport in 1978. Northeastern’s club coach Paula Dumart set it up, according to a Globe report at the time, by simply calling the other three schools. Northeastern hosted the first event at Boston Arena in March 1979 and won it a year before the men’s team claimed their first Beanpot.

Boston University became the first team to beat Northeastern in a Women’s Beanpot, with a 4-0 semifinal shutout on Feb. 17, 1981, to reach that final. BU reached the next year’s final as a club team as well, falling 2-1 to Harvard at BU’s Walter Brown Arena, but they quickly became non-competitive as the other schools’ programs grew.

Harvard was a varsity club from the beginning, coached that inaugural year by future Hockey East commissioner Joe Bertagna, eventually winning multiple Ivy League and ECAC titles before claiming the 1999 national championship under two-decade coach Katey Stone. No school has produced more Patty Kazmaier winners, given annually to the top player in the women’s game. Northeastern, which went varsity in 1980-81, won three ECAC championships before the formation of the Women’s Hockey East in 2002-03 and eight straight Beanpots from 1984–91.

Sammy Davis’ Beanpot-winning goal beats Harvard goalie Lindsay Reed.

Boston College struggled, not going varsity until 1994-95 and posting just one winning season in its first 11, but grew into a national power and has reached 10 of the last 12 NCAA tournaments.

And yet BU — whose men’s team won 30 of the first 63 Beanpots — didn’t go varsity until more than a decade later, in 2005-06, finally able to carve out locker room space when the men vacated Walter Brown for the newly opened Agganis Arena. After losing that 1982 final, BU lost 14 of 17 Beanpot games, beating only BC and losing by lopsided scores. So much so that BU sat out the 1993 and 1994 tournaments, with Brown winning the former in their place.

When BU returned in 1995, the school lost its semifinal 24-0 to Northeastern. In its final 11 Beanpots before becoming a varsity program, the Terriers were shut out 17 times and lost 22 straight games.

Durocher, however, quickly built the Terriers into a power. BU was a winning program by its second varsity season and began a run of six straight NCAA appearances in its fifth, reaching the national championship game in 2011 and 2013. Despite all of that and five Hockey East titles, the Beanpot remained out of reach: A loss in the 2007 final to host BC; Harvard winning at BU in 2008; and Northeastern winning in overtime in 2012.

Then, last week, Reagan Rust scored in a shootout to get BU past Northeastern, setting up a final in which the Terriers outshot host Harvard 48-23 in regulation, yet still needed to come from 2-1 down to force overtime. (Reed saved 103 shots in Harvard’s two games.) After a scoreless third period and an overtime that began with the Crimson controlling the chances, it seemed the drought might roll on another year.

Davis saw fit that it didn’t.

“We kept saying, ‘Do it for the ladies of the ’80s,’ ” she told the Globe. “The win wasn’t just for our team, it was for the girls that came before us and the girls that are going to come after us.”

THE MOMENT WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!! pic.twitter.com/TgVldDtdPI

— BU Women’s Hockey (@TerrierWHockey) February 13, 2019