If you can find something you love as much as John Muse loves hockey, wrap your arms around it and hang on tight.
The 36-year-old Muse, who grew up in East Falmouth, Mass., and still lives on Cape Cod in the offseason, closed the book recently on an exceptional two-decade-long playing career.
His competitiveness and passion for the game carried him a long way.
Muse backstopped a pair of ISL championship teams at Noble & Greenough as a teenager. Moving on to Boston College, he won two NCAA championships and three Beanpots, including a Beanpot MVP.
In his first year as a pro, he won the Kelly Cup championship with the ECHL’s Florida Everblades and was named playoff MVP.
He strapped on his pads all over the United States in the American Hockey League and in the ECHL. He traveled the world, playing in China, Russia, Denmark, Scotland and England.
Most recently he’d minded the net for the Worcester Railers of the ECHL.
When he finally decided to retire as a player, he did it in typical Muse fashion — with a ‘W.’
He stopped 34 shots and earned First Star honors in a 5-3 home victory over the Reading Royals on Dec. 29 before disclosing that it was his last game as a pro and he’ll join the Chinese National Team as a goalie coach.
After all he’s accomplished and all the places he’s been, it was refreshing to hear him talk in a recent interview about how much he loved competing and living the day-to-day life of a player.
Muse’s odyssey began, predictably, in his local rink.
“I started out with Falmouth youth hockey. Once I got a little bit older I started playing off-Cape. I played for the South Shore Dynamos and the Bay State Sharks, Bridgewater Bandits,” he said.
As a freshman at Falmouth High, the future two-time NCAA champion was the backup goalie on the junior varsity.
“Between that and playing freshman baseball, I decided it was in my best interests to go play prep school sports. I felt like I could play at that level and I was lucky enough to get that opportunity at Nobles,” Muse said.
With future NHLers Jimmy Hayes (Dorchester, Mass.) and Mark Fayne (Bourne, Mass.) among his teammates, he steered Nobles to league championships in 2005 and 2006.
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“I still remember Westminster vs. Nobles at Milton Academy in the Flood-Marr (tournament),” said Tommy Cross (Simsbury, Conn.), a Westminster defenseman who later was a teammate of Muse at BC. “He made 50 saves on us and won, 1-0.”
But colleges weren’t beating a path to Muse’s door.
“To be honest, I was seriously considering going to play baseball (in college). Probably October of my senior year BC started talking to me, had some interest, a few other colleges as well,” he said.
“I went on a couple of visits. I went to Harvard. I went to UMass Amherst and then to BC. Right before Christmas time, BC offered me a scholarship and I decided to take that.”
The plan was for Muse to play a year of junior hockey after prep before heading to BC, but he never did make it to juniors.
“The deal was that I was going to take (Vancouver first-round pick) Cory Schneider’s scholarship. Instead of coming back for his senior year, he decided to go pro. I went right in,” Muse said.
“It was a good opportunity for me. I walked into a team that had a lot of pieces already. I played every minute of every game that year and we won the national championship. It was awesome,” said Muse, who went 25-11-8 with a .921 save percentage and limited North Dakota and Notre Dame to one goal apiece at the Frozen Four.
When Muse was a junior in 2009-10, the Eagles won the national title again as he went 19-8-2.
It was a golden era at BC, with coach Jerry York and assistants Mike Cavanaugh (now UConn’s head man), Greg Brown (York’s successor at BC) and goalie coach Jim Logue pressing all the right buttons.
“At the time they were doing a great job recruiting local guys, so it was truly a family feel around everything that was going on there. My roommate ended up being (future NHLer) Brian Gibbons (Braintree, Mass.), a kid that I played with when I was 10 years old,” said Muse. “The majority of the guys were from the Boston area. We all knew each other from growing up together, playing with and against each other. It made for an easy transition, having guys come in that you were already comfortable with and knew.”
And it wasn’t just the players who got along.
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“An underrated aspect of that is how close our families were, too. All of our parents were very close, and I think that helped our team camaraderie a lot,” Muse said. “Those were definitely the closest teams I’ve ever played on. Still, to this day, we all talk to each other, get together and hang out.”
While at BC, Muse earned a reputation as a good teammate and a hard worker.
Patrick Brown, this season’s Providence Bruins captain, was a BC freshman when Muse was a senior in 2010-11.
“He was a pro from the day I met him. Just a good human being. A lot of good days, no bad days. He loves the game and he competes and he’s a fun guy to be around. He’s had an unbelievable career,” said Brown, whose first roommate a few years later after he turned pro with AHL Charlotte was Muse.
Cross says Muse rose to the challenge in the big moments.
“The biggest compliment I can give him is a compliment every goalie would want: He’s always been at his best in the biggest games,” said Cross, a former Boston and Providence Bruin who is now a development coach with the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Never drafted, Muse went from four years at Chestnut Hill to the Portland Pirates in April 2011. In his first pro start he beat the Albany Devils in a shootout, 3-2, making 33 saves.
Over the years in the AHL, Muse went on to play in Charlotte, Texas, Rochester, Lehigh Valley and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, always putting up solid numbers.
And while he signed NHL contracts with Carolina, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, he never faced a shot in the world’s best league.
“To be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be OK with that. It was my ultimate goal growing up and then I took all those steps where I felt it was a realistic goal. Especially coming out of college, I felt like I put myself in a position to get an opportunity to show that I could take that next step,” Muse said.
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“Unfortunately it didn’t work out. It’s not something that I’ll look back at and be OK with. The reason I’m still playing is because I’m competitive. I felt at the time, yes, I deserved an opportunity to show that I could play at that level — and I wholeheartedly believe that I could — but it is what it is and the timing sometimes doesn’t work out the way you hoped.”
Through it all, Muse savored the experiences and the people he’s met.
“Being able to play for so many years and have so many relationships with all different types of people — Americans, Canadians, Europeans, Russians, for me it’s been awesome getting to experience different cultures of the guys I’m playing with,” Muse said. “That’s been the most rewarding part of playing professional hockey, all those relationships I’ve been able to start and grow.”
