The players on the University of Maine men’s hockey team will admit it. Saturday’s bus ride back to Orono after a 7-1 loss to Merrimack in North Andover, Mass., was a long trip, and not a particularly pleasant one.

They had time to think about what went wrong in their worst loss of the season, and how to regroup leading up to their next two games.

Entering this weekend’s Hockey East games against Providence and Boston College, resilience is a necessity for the Black Bears.

“I think after a long bus ride home and a longer video session on Monday, I think everybody kind of got the bad vibes out of them,” Maine defenseman Will O’Neill said.

‘We can’t do anything about those games and they’re in the past now. If we get it out of our minds, focus on the good things and change the bad things, we have a good shot to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us this weekend.”

Currently in fifth place in the conference, Maine hosts Providence at 7 p.m. today and Boston College at 7 p.m. Sunday at Alfond Arena. It’s a chance to earn some valuable points in the Hockey East standings — and a chance for some redemption.

“This weekend’s important because those are two and maybe four points we can grab,” O’Neill said. “That, for starters, is the most important thing. As a whole, we need a better effort across the board.”

Maine Coach Tim Whitehead said he believes the loss at Merrimack, only the Black Bears’ 12th loss to the Warriors since 1978, served as a teaching tool.

“Any time you lose by a significant margin, it forces you to sharpen the saw a little bit,” Whitehead said. “Now that it’s over, I’m glad we lost 7-1 instead of 3-1. It forced us all to look in the mirror and say ‘What can we do better to be the best?’“

Maine defenseman Jeff Dimmen pinpointed one area.

“We’re taking the fact that how hard Merrimack worked, we didn’t,” Dimmen said. “We realized that if we work that hard, good things will happen.

“We’ve had really good focus this week. Practice has been a lot more intense and the compete level has been really good in practice this week.”

But the loss at Merrimack may have been the lowest point of a post-holiday stretch in which the Black Bears have gone 1-2 and have dropped out of the top 10 in both national polls.

In those three games, Maine has been outscored 13-5, outshot 89-80 and its opponents (Miami of Ohio, Cornell and Merrimack) have gone 3 for 8 on the power play against the Black Bears.

“We’re learning from it,” Dimmen said. “We got away from the things we did well in the first half (of the season), and I think we forgot after Christmas what it took to be a good hockey team.”

The Black Bears play their first home game since Dec. 12, a 4-1 win over Massachusetts, and while they won’t have a long bus ride to reflect on the outcome of either game this weekend, they’ll have an opportunity to right their course.

“This weekend’s huge,” Dimmen said. “After Christmas break, we didn’t play the kind of hockey we wanted to play. The results show it.

“It’s good to come back home and hopefully get on a run in the second half. We need to start doing that, and it starts this weekend.”

Staff Writer Rachel Lenzi can be reached at 791-6415 or at:

rlenzi@pressherald.com