Freshman goaltender Taylor Crosby seeks to uphold Northeastern tradition

Some call Marie-Philip Poulin the Sidney Crosby of women’s hockey. But the rising Boston University senior and two-time Olympic gold-medal goal-getter may soon be staring down someone with authentic ties to the Pittsburgh Penguins captain.

The Hart Trophy winner’s younger sister, Taylor Crosby, will be pursuing crease time for the Hub’s other Division I dog pack at Northeastern University this autumn. If she has her way, she will join the program’s pantheon of celestial stoppers and set herself apart among Canada’s next wave of netminders.

While an absence of bloodline references remains remiss, the younger Crosby is shaping impressively separate scrolls. Enrolling at NU is the next hallmark on that front, although she is the first to pause on predictions beyond that.

“I never know if these will be the last four years that I play,” she told Along the Boards this week.

Unmistakably unassuming, Crosby enters the NCAA and Hockey East landscape at a time that allows her to hit the ice sprinting against top-shelf competition. It starts in September, when she faces biscuits from U.S. Olympian Kendall Coyne in practice and works with incumbent senior stopper Chloe Desjardins.

For the record, since spending 2011-12 as Swiss phenom Florence Schelling’s understudy, Desjardins has seen action in 67 of NU’s last 71 games.

If Crosby earns extramural engagement without delay, she could confront the Poulin-led Terrier strike force. There is also the potential to confront a Boston College squad, complete with returning centerpiece and Sochi veteran Alex Carpenter.

Outside of Hockey East, there may be a second-round Beanpot bout with Harvard, featuring U.S. Olympians Lyndsey Fry and Michelle Picard.

“I think that’s the most exciting part,” said Crosby, who to date has only tested herself against established world-class competition in informal settings.

“I’m just out to improve,” she added, “and hopefully take advantage of being on a team with Kendall.”

That and return a favor to an institution that wooed her with its historic grounds and a program that strengthened its magnetic pull with its celestial goaltending graduates. In this century alone, the centenarian Matthews Arena has let the likes of Chanda Gunn and Schelling scrape its blue paint.

Gunn, a 2004 graduate, was a three-time nominee for the Patty Kazmaier Award and later donned the Star-Spangled Sweater in Torino. Those 2006 Olympic Games marked the first of three tournaments for Schelling, who in between bolstered the start of current NU head coach Dave Flint’s tenure.

Crosby confessed that those predecessors drizzled another layer of appeal when the Huskies recruited her. But that aspect was an empty-net conversion after the campus’ amiable atmosphere won her over.

“I was all over the map,” she said of her college search. “I was just looking for a place that felt like home. No other school gave me that feeling. There was no other school that had the same effect on me.

“Not only the school, it’s a great school, the coaching staff is awesome. When you walk into a rink and can picture yourself playing there — you have to be in that position. It’s indescribable.”

Conversely, her appetite for fulfillment speaks for itself and carries over from her travel career. She joined 14 of her peers at last summer’s Hockey Canada goaltending camp and college will be key to breaking the surface of her country’s uber-quantitative, uber-qualitative pool.

With her skill set and background, Crosby could pen a Schelling 2.0 log as an NU freshman. Schelling arrived in 2008 and prompted a near 50-50 split of the crease time with reigning team MVP Leah Sulyma.

If Crosby matches that first impression, she will owe it to her nothing-to-lose mentality on the coming campaign, after Desjardins graduates and after she graduates. That mentality emboldens her compatibility with a program still searching for modern glory.

Since Flint and Schelling’s second season in 2009-10, the Huskies have been a perennial threat for the Hockey East pennant and NCAA tournament qualification. But they have variously fallen ice chips shy of an at-large national bid and lost the conference championship game in 2011 and 2013.

Crosby can relate. She spent the last four seasons at Shattuck-St. Mary’s School, winners of five 19-and-under and three 16-and-under national championships in the last decade. Yet through two years apiece at each level, she missed out on a ring.

“I’m still trying to develop myself and achieve new things,” she said. “At Shattuck, I never was fortunate enough to win a national championship. I came close. So I know that coming to an organization that’s doing the same thing makes me more motivated to play a part.”

This article originally appeared on Along the Boards