Notre Dame coach Jeff Jackson has brought six teams to the Frozen Four, four with Lake Superior State and two now with the Fighting Irish.
One would think that all those teams shared a common thread of a lock-down defense and some of them the abundance of freshmen in this year’s edition. But while that might be true to some extent, Jackson sees this year’s team as unique.
“Every team is different,” he said. ”It has to do with the makeup of the players you are coaching and the character and the personality of the people involved.
“I give [the team leaders] credit. They don’t take credit that much because they’ve led, but they’ve also backed off when they needed to.
“The chemistry of the group came together in a very positive way. Joe [Lavin] and Ryan [Guentzel] last summer when all those freshmen were at summer school, did a good job of incorporating them and making them all feel important but not too important.
“This group has been different from any team I have had in the Frozen Four. If there are similarities, it would be back to the Lake State teams of 1988 or 1992, when we had really large freshman classes. [But] back then the freshman classes at Lake State were a little bit older than this freshman class.”
