Each week, USCHO.com will pick the top 10 moments from the past weekend in our Monday 10 feature.
1) The field is set
For six months, 59 college hockey teams took to the ice intent on reaching April’s Frozen Four in Boston. On Sunday night, the field reduced itself to 16 teams with the announcement of the 2022 NCAA tournament.
The PairWise Rankings largely removes the element of surprise, but the weekend’s events twisted and turned the road down the path that led to the announcement of the four, four-team regionals that will play off to produce the field. In total, five teams advanced out of the NCHC while three qualified from the Big Ten and Hockey East. ECAC Hockey and the CCHA each sent two teams to the bracket, and one team qualified from Atlantic Hockey.
Nearly every regional will feature one team with a potential home ice advantage, but the No. 1 seeds are all from western-based leagues. Two NCHC schools – Denver and Western Michigan – led the pack while Hockey East failed to produce a No. 1 or No. 2 seed for the first time since the league’s inception in 1984, at which time the tournament only had eight teams.
Every regional will also feature at least one team that won its respective league championship with two first round matchup – Michigan-AIC and Minnesota State-Harvard – featuring conference champions.
2) A very B1G championship
Both Michigan and Minnesota entered the weekend locked into the NCAA tournament field, but the prospect of playing for the national championship’s bigger prize didn’t stop either team from producing an instant classic in Minneapolis. Sure, Michigan won, 4-3, but the No. 3 Gophers, the regular season champion, staged a furious third period comeback that turned a 4-1 cruisefest into a hard-fought, B1G battle for the ages.
The teams set a tone by each scoring in the game’s first 90 seconds, but Michigan took control thereafter by adding one more in the first and two in the second. The first-round trio of Brendan Brisson, Matty Beniers and Luke Hughes combined for the first goal before Mackie Samoskevich gave the Wolverines a 2-1 lead with an assist from Johnny Beecher.
Dylan Duke and Kent Johnson staked Michigan to its 4-1 lead, but it wouldn’t hold through the game’s final minute. A hooking penalty and a holding penalty to Nolan Moyle and Jacob Truscott gave Minnesota a 5-on-3 advantage, and after pulling the goalie for an extra attacker, Matthew Knies potted consecutive goals in the last minute. The last came with five seconds on the clock – hardly enough time to score a last equalizer – but served as a 60-minute notice that these teams might not be done with one another.
For Michigan, winning the Big Ten championship for the first time in six years likely means the Wolverines will hold the No. 1 overall slot in the NCAA tournament while Minnesota slipped to sixth in the Pairwise Rankings. A No. 2 seed, the Gophers could potentially meet up with their Big Ten rivals in Boston if they both advance to play for a national championship.
3) UConn narrowly misses history
The upstart story of the UConn Huskies took a strange turn this weekend after the school’s heralded men’s basketball team bombed out of the NCAA tournament with a loss to San Diego State. Almost immediately, attention turned to the hockey team, which clinched its first Hockey East semifinal appearance last week by beating Boston University. Their reward was a semifinal matchup against Northeastern, the regular season champion possessing both the conference’s Coach of the Year in Jerry Keefe and Rookie of the Year in goalie Devon Levi.
Not many people regarded UConn as a threat, but expectations of a Northeastern-UMass championship game were thwarted when UConn pounded Levi with 37 shots and a defiant, 4-1 win.
Unintimidated, the win allowed IceBus fans to dream of seeing their name hang in TD Garden, and after 60 minutes against UMass the next night, a stalemate sent the Hockey East Championship to overtime for the first time since 2010.
Unfortunately for UConn, the story didn’t have the fairytale ending. UMass scored just over three minutes into overtime by working a gritty, blue-collar offensive zone set, and Aaron Bohlinger wristed an uncontested shot from just high of the circles to hand the Minutemen their second consecutive and second overall Hockey East championship.
The win had downstream impact throughout the national tournament picture since a UConn win likely would have knocked Northeastern out of its at-large spot, but the program, which has been in Hockey East for less than a decade, more than showed it was worthy of challenging the defending national champion.
4) Minnesota State wins CCHA with overtime overdrive
Northeastern’s trip to the NCAA tournament had to withstand more than just its own conference championship, but the deciding game to determine the Huskies’ at-large spot in the Pairwise took a turn for the surreal when Minnesota State won the Mason Cup twice in one night.
The Mavericks hosted the CCHA championship against Bemidji State on Saturday night with a chance to lock down one of the top two overall seeds in the tournament if they won. They seemingly had that happen, also in overtime, when Josh Groll slid an apparent goal past goalie Mattias Sholl. The requisite laundry sale spread across the ice, and commissioner Don Lucia handed the championship trophy over to the No. 1 team in the nation. The fans spilled out into the Mankato night, and the celebrations began in earnest for the first champion of the conference’s new iteration.
The only problem with that happy ending was the review that lasted roughly an hour. Officials needed to look at the goal and determined that Groll beat Sholl only when the puck lifted off its moorings and slid underneath the side of the cage. The teams were summoned back to the ice, and after a five-minute warmup period, the game resumed. Two minutes of game time later, Jack McNeely beat Sholl – cleanly – to win the Mason Cup for the second time that night.
The surreality of it all hung over the national tournament picture because Bemidji would have likely eliminated the last team in the tournament with a win. The 16th-ranked team, which was Clarkson, was always going to be eliminated when Atlantic Hockey crowned its champion, but Harvard unexpectedly defeated Quinnipiac on Saturday night to win the ECAC Hockey championship. As a result, No. 15 Ohio State was eliminated, leaving Northeastern squarely on the bubble. A Bemidji win – or the aforementioned UConn win – would have knocked the Huskies out, though the drama was negated by the Mavericks’ second win of the night.
5) 10,000 men of Harvard claim ECAC Hockey victory
The fact that the situation came into play was the direct result of Harvard’s upset win in the ECAC Hockey championship earlier in the night. After beating RPI in three games in the conference quarterfinals, a 5-3 win over Clarkson on Friday night sent the Crimson into the eponymous championship game against Quinnipiac with the second-most wins in the nation.
Like their 1-0 game won by Harvard, neither team fully grabbed an advantage over the full 60 minutes, but Quinnipiac still needed to rally twice to force overtime against the upstart Crimson, a team that missed all of last season when the Ivy League canceled its participation in winter sports. The Bobcats succeeded each time, first on a first period goal by TJ Friedmann and later on a second-period goal by Jayden Lee when they trailed 1-0 and 2-1, but it was Matthew Coronato who finalized the stamp to the tournament when he produced the second strike for his linemates Ian Moore and Sean Farrell.
The goal itself was a thing of beauty. Harvard caught Quinnipiac out of position as it broke into the offensive zone, and the quick, crisp passing allowed Coronato to step into a shot from inside the blue line as the defenders transitioned into their assignments. The wrist shot was strikingly similar to Aaron Bohlinger’s goal for UMass, and it rocketed past goalie Yaniv Perets’ glove to give Harvard its first ECAC Hockey championship since 2017 and third since the tournament moved back to Lake Placid in 2014.
6) Bulldog business
None of the four teams at the Xcel Energy Center had to worry about playing for their national tournament lives, but the three games at the NCHC Frozen Faceoff still managed to produce the drama associated with arguably the best conference in college hockey when the lower seed won its way through the championship game. First came top-seeded Denver’s demise when Minnesota-Duluth won a 2-0 shutout, and second-seeded North Dakota met a similar end when Western Michigan came from behind on an early 1-0 deficit to immediate tie and later win a 4-2 result. Western couldn’t complete the double on the weekend, though, and dropped its first appearance in the NCHC Championship when Minnesota-Duluth won a 3-0 final.
The NCHC long knew it would send five teams to the national tournament, but the Duluth win pressured Denver for the final No. 1 seed in the national tournament. It pushed the Bulldogs into a PWR tie with the Pioneers behind No. 3 Western Michigan, while North Dakota and St. Cloud wrapped up the entries from the nation’s leading conference. By winning the championship, Scott Sandelin’s team prevented WMU from winning its first championship in its first trip to the championship game while simultaneously clinching a third league title in the eight years of conference tournaments.
7) AIC rumbles to third tournament win
There was a time when the thought of American International building a college hockey dynasty wasn’t steeped in any type of reality, but those days were blown away by the Yellow Jackets’ third consecutive Atlantic Hockey tournament victory and fourth straight league championship crown. On Saturday, the league championship went back to Springfield again after AIC thundered past Air Force, 7-0.
Both Chris Dodero and Julius Janhonen scored twice in the win over the Falcons, with Dodero adding two assists. Blake Bennett and Zak Galambos added a goal and two assists apiece, and Alec Calvaruso won for the 10th time in net with his second shutout of the season.
The win came a day after AIC narrowly edged Mercyhurst, 5-4, in the semifinals. The Yellow Jackets rallied from two separate deficits in that game thanks to a hat trick by Bennet but were otherwise unthreatened throughout the postseason after posting a perfect 4-0 record. It was the first perfect postseason in the league since Air Force won four straight in 2017 and the first perfect postseason by an Atlantic Hockey top seed since RIT’s Frozen Four season of 2010.
8) But it wasn’t UMD’s only championship opportunity this weekend
Minnesota-Duluth may have won the NCHC championship for the third time, but its women’s program deserves major credit for restoring an original powerhouse to the national championship game for the first time since 2010. The Bulldogs endured a six-season playoff drought after it led off the 21st century with five championships between 2001-2010 and followed up last year’s Frozen Four berth with a repeat performance in this year’s expanded tournament.
They fell short in their bid to win a sixth championship, though, after losing to Ohio State in the national championship game. The Buckeyes, who went 10-25-1 during the 2015-2016 season, have steadily built a powerhouse under head coach Nadine Muzerall, and after missing the postseason as WCHA champions two years ago when COVID-19 hit, they advanced to their second-ever Frozen Four last year before losing to Wisconsin.
In an intriguing cross-section of women’s hockey’s past and present, Ohio State defeated Minnesota-Duluth on Sunday after Kenzie Hauswirth broke a 2-2 stalemate with exactly 6:30 left on the clock in the third period. Duluth pressured the Ohio State defense from there, but the Bulldogs fell short in a one-goal game after both pulling their goalie and calling timeout.
With the win, Ohio State clinched the 18th different national championship for the WCHA while becoming the fifth different team to win an NCAA championship. The Buckeyes are the first new champion since Clarkson won the 2014 title.
9) Fans flock back to championships
The drama of winning conference championships in overtime validated the decision of thousands of fans to file through turnstiles and return to arenas for one of college hockey’s finest weekends. For most leagues, the sight of thousands of fans cheering and screaming for their respective teams turned the games into exactly what was missed last year when COVID-19 forced championships behind closed doors.
Playing the CCHA and Big Ten championships on campus sites added a different brand of flair, but there was no questioning the success offered by the neutral-site games from Hockey East, the NCHC or ECAC Hockey. Over 15,000 fans were in attendance at TD Garden for the Hockey East semifinals before an additional 12,000-plus attended the UMass-UConn matchup in the championship, and over 10,000 fans flocked to St. Paul for the NCHC’s semifinals before 7,800 fans attended Minnesota-Duluth’s championship game win.
Even ECAC Hockey, which returned to Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, N.Y, saw nearly 4,500 fans watch Harvard win the Whitelaw Cup, a number rivaled by the standing room-only, on-campus game at Minnesota State, and as expected, the Big Ten Championship sold out the more than 10,000 seats at 3M Arena at Mariucci.
The same, unfortunately, could not be said for Atlantic Hockey, which moved its championship weekend to Utica, N.Y. for the first time. The first day of games drew less than 1,000 fans for the wins by Air Force and AIC, and the championship game drew an announced attendance of 250 to the Adirondack Bank Center.
10) Let’s go dancing
For six months, college hockey’s road to Boston has toiled through league schedules and conference tournaments. The excitement wrought by the sport’s return to the new normal in a world impacted by COVID-19 generated an unparalleled atmosphere and unleashed a new brand on fans, players, coaches and the entire hockey community. The road, as it seems, now enters its final approach this weekend as the four regionals take to the ice.
Regional action begins on Thursday when both the East and West Regionals kick off in Albany, N.Y., and Loveland, Colo. The East starts things off with No. 1 seed and No. 2 overall Minnesota State playing No. 4 Harvard before continuing with the West Regional’s game between No. 2 Minnesota Duluth and No. 3 Michigan Tech. Coverage continues in the evening session with the East’s second game between No. 2 North Dakota and No. 3 Notre Dame before wrapping up with the West’s game between host institution Denver and fourth-seeded UMass-Lowell.
A similar schedule kicks off on Friday with the Northeast Regional’s game between No. 1 Western Michigan and No. 4 Northeastern before top overall seed Michigan plays No. 4 seed AIC in the Midwest Regional’s first game. No. 2 Minnesota and No. 3 UMass continue action in the Northeast at 6 p.m. before the night wraps up in the Midwest between No. 2 Quinnipiac and No. 3 St. Cloud State.
Winners will advance to regional finals on Saturday and Sunday with the Frozen Four taking place on April 7 and April 9 at TD Garden in Boston.
