Each week, USCHO.com will pick the top 10 moments from the past weekend in our Monday 10 feature.
1) Let’s have a tournament
The NCAA tournament bracket unveiling on Sunday afternoon carried the fanfare of a nationally-televised audience, but little drama existed about the 16-team field or their regional placements. Quinnipiac’s loss to Cornell in the ECAC Hockey semifinals removed the doubt that began the weekend swirling around the at-large bubble, and each of the six conferences crowned their respective champion without creating waves on the national radar.
Boston College wasn’t involved in the weekend, but the Eagles locked themselves into the No. 1 overall seed long before their Hockey East quarterfinal loss to Northeastern. As expected, BC earned its way to Manchester, N.H., while Michigan State, Maine and Western Michigan gained the remaining No. 1 seeds. From there, slotting teams into regionals became easy.
2) Black Bears roar
Hockey East built its reputation around its Massachusetts-centric heartbeat. Even in its initial expansion phase, the league only nominally spread away from the radial highways surrounding Greater Boston, and it took the 21st century additions of Vermont and Connecticut to create longer bus trips outside of Maine’s outlier status. As a result, the championship banner hanging in Boston’s TD Garden often held teams from the Hub’s area, and this year began with a 20-year drought for a championship born outside of the Bay State’s borders.
That long layoff was guaranteed to end after Connecticut and Maine won their respective semifinal games, but the tradition wrought by Black Bear hockey commandeered North Station to the tune of a decisive 5-2 rout. The team twice held three-goal leads and spent a marginal 10-plus minutes in a scoreless tie throughout the first period before claiming its sixth Hockey East championship.
Maine last won the title when Ben Murphy scored a triple-overtime goal to defeat UMass, so being forced to advance through a double overtime game against Northeastern at least provided an homage to the team’s past.
Goaltender Albin Boija, meanwhile, won his third and fourth Hockey East Championship tournament games. Now the No. 3 overall seed, the Black Bears head to the Allentown Regional and a first-round matchup with fourth-seeded and host Penn State.
3) Spartan spirit
Few things match the intensity of an overtime playoff winner. Fewer things match that intensity in front of a home crowd. Fewer things still match the feeling of a championship won in overtime in front of a home crowd.
Isaac Howard fully understands that feeling. His high slot slam past Logan Terness gave Michigan State its second straight Big Ten championship in front of Munn Arena’s white-cld crowd and sent the Spartans into the national tournament as the highest-ranked conference champion.
Going to double overtime only occurred because of a third period comeback capped by a late goal from Gunnarwolfe Fontaine. Having previously trailed twice by two goals, Ohio State scored late in the first period to halve Michigan State’s initial 2-0 lead before goals by Damien Carfagne and Fontaine moved the Buckeyes into overtime. From there, it was Howard’s second goal of the night that ended the dramatic theater and sent East Lansing into delirium.
4) Falcons fly
Another two-goal deficit in the first period occurred in Atlantic Hockey America, but Bentley’s rally to take a 3-2 lead in the second period anchored the Falcons to a 6-3 win and their first-ever Division I conference tournament championship and the only title clinched over the weekend by a true road team.
Holy Cross had opened the game with a pair of power play goals, but adding a third power play goal in the third period did little to stop the third-seeded Falcons from motoring through the Hart Center. Billed as a top matchup between the league’s preeminent goaltenders, the six goals scored by Bentley topped the Crusaders’ defensive allotment for the season.
Both programs previously met for the 2006 championship, but Holy Cross was playing in its second championship game in three years. Bentley, meanwhile, finished in one of the league’s two bottom spots in 2023 and was previously voted to finish dead last ahead of the 2023-2024 season. Having now capped their season turnaround, the Falcons moved into the No. 16 spot among qualified teams, which in turn guaranteed a game against No. 1 Boston College.
5) One for the Big Red road
Mike Schafer infamously began his head coaching career at Cornell by winning back-to-back championships. As his career wound down in Ithaca, the longtime leader of the defending champion Big Red sought to replicate that success before bowing out of the national spotlight.
Achieving the mountaintop required the sixth-seeded team to eliminate the league’s first and second place teams in the semifinal and championship rounds. Having first vanquished Quinnipiac, the Big Red scored twice in the first period to stake a 2-0 lead over Clarkson in Saturday’s championship game, and Ryan Walsh’s late third period goal sealed a 3-1 win that allowed Schafer to hoist the Whitelaw Cup for a second consecutive – and final – year.
Winning the championship had a downstream impact on the Pairwise Rankings because the Big Red vaulted into the No. 15 spot among qualified teams. As a result, Michigan fell out of the tournament, and Cornell drew No. 2 Michigan State in the Ohio-based regional in Toledo.
6) Controversy avoided
The draconian rules facing St. Thomas turned the CCHA’s championship into a bit of an anticlimactic affair, but whatever controversy could have arisen from a victory for the tournament-ineligible Tommies ended when Minnesota State claimed a 4-2 victory in Mankato.
The Mavericks, for what it’s worth, didn’t lead until the latter stages of the third period, and the game produced a back-and-forth affair throughout the second period. A scoreless first was a 0-0 stalemate, but Matthew Gleason staked his team to a 1-0 lead in the first half of the second period. Luigi Benincasa’s power-play goal evened things up three minutes later, but Kaden Bohlsen’s goal with under seven minutes remaining didn’t last into the locker room because of Liam Malmquist’s own power play goal.
Ending the second period in another tie game, Minnesota State grabbed the lead on Evan Murr’s goal at the halfway point before sealing the CCHA title with another late one.
It was Minnesota State’s third championship in the four-year span since the conference’s reformation and sent the Mavericks towards their aforementioned tournament berth. They now face No. 4 Western Michigan in the Fargo regional hosted by North Dakota.
7) Speaking of North Dakota
The next axe of the offseason coaching carousel swung on Sunday night when the University of North Dakota announced that head coach Brad Berry would not return after 10 seasons in Grand Forks. The leader of the 2016 national champion, the announcement caught plenty of people by surprise but came on the heels of North Dakota missing the national tournament for the second time in three years.
The former assistant coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets was in his second stint with North Dakota after twice returning to his alma mater as an assistant coach. The top assistant to Dave Hakstol became the head coach when Hakstol departed for the NHL, and his first season completed a mission that began when the program achieved consecutive Frozen Four appearances in Hakstol’s last two years.
A five-time regular-season champion of the league, he was twice named Herb Brooks Coach of the Year as the NCHC’s best bench boss and shared the Spencer Penrose Award with Cornell’s Mike Schafer as the best coach in college hockey in 2020.
8) Meanwhile, Western went No. 1
Lost in that shuffle was Western Michigan’s first-ever NCHC championship win. The two-time CCHA champions from the pre-realignment era were bound to the No. 1 seed when the conference’s final field traveled to the Twin Cities, but it took a three-goal comeback in the third period and a double overtime winner by Alex Bump to eliminate Denver and clinch sweet revenge for 2022’s loss to Minnesota Duluth.
Bump scored twice in the 4-3 win, but the real impact occurred when the Broncos leapfrogged Minnesota for the No. 4 overall seed in the tournament. Granted No. 1 status, their movement to Fargo as the top seed guaranteed a matchup against Minnesota State where remaining as a No. 2 seed would have flipped them into a game against third-seeded UMass. Instead, it’s Minnesota’s turn to play the Minutemen while the Broncos draw the Mavericks in the first round.
9) Who’s in and who’s out?
Boston College, Minnesota and Penn State all failed to advance to their conference semifinal round, but little drama forced the three teams to sweat out results throughout the week after it became apparent that too few low seeds advanced to their respective championship games. BC was already the No. 1 seed, and the lone storyline encompassing Minnesota flip-flopped the Gophers with Western in the Fargo regional.
Penn State entered the week with an outside possibility at missing the national tournament, but the Nittany Lions remained in the field after Northeastern lost its semifinal game to Maine. They remained as the No. 4 seed but were already locked into the Allentown regional as the host site.
Quinnipiac, meanwhile, survived to advance to the tournament as a No. 4 seed after both Arizona State and North Dakota lost in the NCHC semifinals, though the Bobcats lost to Cornell and ended another ECAC postseason without trophy hardware.
Michigan wasn’t so lucky. Already on tenuous ground, the Wolverines needed Hockey East, the NCHC and ECAC to advance their top seeds to the championship game. When Quinnipiac lost the ECAC semifinal, the Wolverines were effectively out of the tournament while ECAC indirectly became a two-bid league – the same number as the NCHC.
10) Eight ball, side pocket
Wisconsin women’s hockey head coach Mark Johnson leaned over his bench and asked which player wanted to take a penalty shot with under 20 seconds remaining in the third period of the 2025 NCAA Division I women’s national championship game against Ohio State.
Almost immediately, Kirsten Simms raised her hand. A Buckeye player had closed her hand over the puck on the goal line in a one-goal game, and the moment would hang the national championship in the balance.
Simms deked around Amanda Thiele to score the game-tying goal, but she etched her name into the college hockey annals by later scoring a put-back rebound in overtime to touch off the celebration of a 4-3 win.
The Badgers previously trailed by a 3-1 deficit but used a second period goal to cut into the lead ahead of the third period.
The win handed Wisconsin its eighth national championship, the most among women’s hockey programs.
