Many things come to mind when North Dakota fans think about their hockey team’s unique selling points.
There are the eight national championships, but more recently, the Fighting Hawks have also become known for their destination games.
The U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame Game, exempt from teams’ 34-game regular-season limit, is a tradition that has taken UND just about across the width of the country over the last six years.
Those games can take place at schools’ home rinks, too, but UND played Cornell in New York in 2016, Minnesota as Las Vegas’ Orleans Arena in 2018, Penn State in Nashville, Tenn., last season and returned to Las Vegas last weekend to meet Arizona State on Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena.
The last two such games didn’t go UND’s way. The Hawks dropped a 6-4 decision last October against Penn State, and on Saturday, a heavily pro-UND crowd of 15,503 saw the Hawks cough up a 2-0 first-period lead and lose 3-2.
Gavin Hain and Jake Schmaltz scored 2:03 apart in the first period for UND, and that had the home of the NHL’s Vegas Golden Knights buzzing. Fans from the de facto home team would go home happiest, though. Arizona State tied the game on two power-play goals before Robert Mastrosimone buried a breakaway chance 24 seconds into the third period.
“A ton of our loyal supporters turned out for it, and it was a situation where it was a one-game weekend and I thought we didn’t play our best as far as what we bring to the table,” UND coach Brad Berry said.
“I congratulate ASU because I think they played a really good team game and played well, and at the end of the day, we have some things to work on here and try to get better at. In saying that, it’s early in the season here, and we’re going to get to work and we go into our conference schedule, where it’s a blank slate. We turn the page and we’ll try to build our body of work within our league now.”
UND has four more nonconference games left this season, against Bemidji State and Lindenwood’s new Division I squad. Three of those games will take place at the Hawks’ Ralph Engelstad Arena, and until at least the fall of 2025, UND’s nonconference schedules will look a little more normal with no more additional destination games currently in the works.
UND is open to playing more of those somewhere down the line. The Hawks have even traveled outside the country to play — they had exhibition games in suburban Vancouver in 2014 — and can do so once every four years. Hockey East and ECAC Hockey teams take advantage of this dispensation by participating in the Friendship Four, a tournament that returns this month after two years off due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID has wiped out UND games across the Atlantic Ocean, too. The Hawks tentatively planned to play exhibition games in Sweden and Finland in August and September 2020 before the world — not just the hockey one — changed.
“We haven’t really explored that opportunity since COVID, but that’s not to say that we won’t,” said Berry, who played one year of professional hockey in Sweden. “I know they have that college series in (Northern) Ireland every year and they keep doing that, and we’re open on doing it but I think it’s a situation where you want to try to give your players the student-athlete experience, whether it’s a destination game or something else.”
But now, Berry is focused on the start of UND’s conference slate, starting with a trip this week to Omaha. The Mavericks are UND’s travel partners in the NCHC, and this Friday-Saturday set could provide an intriguing preview for when the teams meet again March 3-4 in Grand Forks.
“It’s two teams that play relatively the same way: fast, hard and there’s a lot of intensity to the games,” Berry said. “We’ll play them again at the end of the regular season, and those games mean a ton for both teams, with potentially a Penrose (Cup, the NCHC’s regular-season championship) or whatever that weekend looks like.
“Last year, we won the Penrose on the Friday night in overtime (in Omaha), and it’s coming back to our building this year. When you’re playing that last game of the season in March against your travel partner, it’s special.”
