Notes on the Frozen Four (long)

Since I think I was the only eLFer there, I thought I should post my Frozen Four diary.

Gee, I Wonder if There's Some Hockey Being Played This Weekend

I flew Delta from LGA to MSP via CVG (Cincinnati), and the second leg was almost surreally populated with Frozen Four-goers. I knew there would be a heavy Minnesota contingent at the actual games, but this forty-seat plane had about twenty Maine fans and ten UNH fans, plus a couple of transplanted Michiganders and myself. There was a healthy debate for most of the 1 hr., 40 min. flight on whose team was better, whether Hahvahd and Cornell "belonged" in Worcester (the final verdict was no to Hahvahd and yes to Cornell, which was gratifying), and how obnoxious the Minnesota fans were going to be.

The remaining few passengers just sort of smiled, nodded, and nervously ate their pretzels.

Minnesota Nice

The gentleman who'd won the bidding on eBay for my extra pair of tickets turns out to have been Northwest Airlines's Chief 757 Pilot, so he was able to get through security and meet me at the gate with a crayon-written sign saying "Jeff - Hockey!" He even helped me carry one of my bags (hey, I was still on a cane) down to baggage claim to meet my friend Mikey. He's only based in Minnesota because he works for Northwest; he grew up in Seattle and had never been to any college hockey games before. In fact until a couple of Wild games this season, he'd never been to any hockey games before. Yet he was so excited about this that his winning bid on one of my pair was enough to pay for most of the other pair - and he wasn't even going to be able to attend the finals.

The University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople

Wednesday night a bunch of us went to see Peter Schickele perform some of PDQ Bach's works as well as some of his own. If you've never seen him perform live, I highly recommend it. Classical music and rude comedy go very well together and he never ceases to amaze me.

Hey, Did You Go to Cornell?

Turns out the woman who asked me that as I passed her in the concession hallway at the X was Carol Mullins, the women's hockey coach at Cornell. We had a great chat about the men's season, Schafer's feelings on the season, how the women were doing, and what next year might be like. Coach Mullins wasn't just there for the Frozen Four; it turns out she was headed up to St. Cloud on the off-day for some recruiting. I hope it went well.

Can't Get Theah from Heah

The first semifinal, Maine vs. UNH, was exciting for about two periods. Those who watched or listened to the games will know what I'm talking about; UNH kept it close until the middle of the third period, when their goalie Ayers pretty much started his vacation a bit too early. I hadn't really decided whom to root for; I have friends who went to both schools, and I couldn't choose between the two Cornellian instincts "revenge on UNH" or "credibility of losing to the eventual national champ," so I pretty much was just hoping for good hockey. Ah, well; Maine won 7-2, and Minnesota fans started leaving with 5 minutes left in the game to find a good place for an early dinner.

Attendance: 19,214
Broke all-time records for:

- Attendance at Frozen Four game
- Attendance at college hockey event in Minnesota
- Attendance at any event at the XCel Energy Center

Great Rink; Needs a Neighborhood Around It

I had to drive back to Minneapolis to pick up my host Mikey from work before the second game; it's a good thing we came back to St. Paul early. There are a couple of hotels and a few restaurants and pubs in the general vicinity of the X, but not nearly enough. (Actually, perhaps it's enough for the usual Wild crowd.) So rather than wait 45 minutes to sit down at a restaurant or count on the rink food being decent, we waited on the ridiculously long, but fast-moving, line at Subway. If St. Paul hosts again anytime soon, they should do something about the tourism infrastructure near the X.

In any event, the X is a really outstanding place to watch hockey; it's well-lit, the video and scoreboard displays are very sharp, and the concessions aren't as outrageously expensive as they might've been (though a lot of Minnesota fans were surprised and disappointed that you couldn't buy beer at an NCAA game). My one major complaint was where the NCAA stuck the pep bands; they were in the uppermost bowl, where you really couldn't hear them or, from many places in the arena, even see them on the other side of the scoreboard.

I'd actually been slightly tempted on Thursday to sell my remaining tickets for a huge profit and just go out to some nice dinners the rest of the weekend; apparently, though there were hundreds of tickets available to the first semifinal at below face value, there were hundreds of people looking for tickets to the second semifinal (of course, since it was Minnesota) and paying prices upwards of $400-500 per ticket. But hey, I went there for good hockey - and goodness knows they didn't need more Minnesota fans there.

Four Thousand Holes in Blackburn, Michigan

Okay, so it was a good, close game and Blackburn didn't goal play badly, but I've been playing with that header in my mind for days, so tough. This was the good, close hockey I'd been hoping for and expecting, even though Minnesota had a 3-0 lead less than two minutes into the third period. Michigan didn't lay down and die, and they tried their best, apparently finally figuring out that Hauser couldn't stop lateral shots nearly as well as he could stop shots that were actually aimed at the net. Of course it wasn't enough, and Minnesota won 3-2. Among the things we non-Minnesota fans learned at this game: Minnesota fans know how to spell "Minnesota" better than UNH fans know how to spell "UNH."

Attendance: 19,234
Broke all-time records for:

- Attendance at Frozen Four game
- Attendance at college hockey event in Minnesota
- Attendance at any event at the XCel Energy Center

...again.

Selde is the Friday al the Wyke Y-lyke

(Chaucer...? But I hardly even know her...!)

On Friday night Mikey and I met up with a couple of fellow contributors to the Top5 List (http://www.topfive.com/) at a great little upscale pub called Chang O'Hara's. If you've never had a cheddarburger with a large shmear of roasted garlic on it, I highly recommend it. Cleans those pipes pretty well.

Great, Because the Midwest Definitely Needs More Sports Bars

On Saturday I got together with an old, old friend from summer camp and his wife, and we had lunch at one of the many sports bars in the Cities' suburbs. They're apparently planning to move closer to her native rural North Dakota and open a sports bar, but in the meantime they really enjoy St. Paul. She must be really, really great, 'cause he's about as much of an East Coast Jewish Guy Who Needs Good Food and Culture as I am.

Of Course I Knew Someone Else There

During the title game Saturday evening, I was on my way back from a concession stand (or rather, from getting a drink from the only free source of cold water in the entire building, a water fountain behind a fruit smoothie stand) when I heard someone call out "BJ!" Turned out to be Susie Curtis '94. (No, not the Susan Curtis '94 who ran track at Cornell, but the Susie Curtis '94 who was in the marching band at Cornell. Easy mistake.) She and our mutual friends Jen Evans '93 and Anastasia Enos '93 were sprinkled throughout the arena for the games, and apparently had been making a habit of going to the Frozen Four for a few years now. So I expect I'll see them in Buffalo, too, and maybe we'll even plan to meet this time.

Harkness, Harkness... he coached hockey, right?

Behind me at the title game was a gentleman who's been attending the Frozen Four for somewhere around thirty years now, without missing one (something to aspire to). He played for Harkness at RPI in the 1950s; unfortunately, he says, he was a freshman in 1953-54 and so wasn't on the national championship team. He played on some very good RPI teams, but never made it to the NCAA tourney. He had a lot of nice things to say about Harkness and about Cornell.

Gosh, What a Shame This Wasn't Televised

During one of the intermissions in the final, some mascot or other (I guess it would've had to be the Maine Black Bear or the Minnesota Golden Gopher, but I honestly don't remember) skated out with a big trash can and one of those Nerf-esque rotating football-bomb-shaped things. He tossed it up into the crowd, and as people all around me shoved each other aside to get into position, it dropped into my hands while I was calmly sitting in my seat and carrying on a conversation.

(Last time that sort of thing happened, it was at a wedding; the gorgeous maid of honor had caught the bouquet, so the groom's fraternity brothers were jockeying pretty hard for the best place to catch the garter when it fell into my hands. See for the subsequent following of tradition.)

So after someone explained what the heck I was supposed to do (throw it back and get it into the big trash can on the ice, duh), I stood up, wobbling without benefit of my cane, and shanked the throw. Greg Berge may have won a box of cereal at Lake Placid in 1996, but dammit, I got to have 10,000 people boo at me!! )

How's that Spelled Again?

The Minnesota fans were pretty pumped up for the finals, but I was not particularly impressed with their knowledge of the game. Sure, if you have 95% of the fans in a rink, you're going to make some noise when the ref calls a penalty on you or fails to make a call you believe he should've made on the opposing team, but you really should learn the rules about icing and boarding before you start making much noise. Plus, yelling a ten-count when a Maine player is lying on the ice after being boarded is not exactly classy.

I was delighted, though, when Maine put up a serious fight in this game. I'm sure some western fans will still say that the final result "proves" something about eastern inferiority, but let's face it, this was a very evenly-matched game. In fact if the ref hadn't swallowed his whistle for overtime, it might very well have been a Maine victory. Hauser - not once, but twice - deliberately extended his stick to trip Maine players in overtime, and the ref was somewhere near both times. Eventually, I think the whining got to him, and he decided he was going to call the next penalty-esque thing he saw: A Maine player and a Minnesota player colliding, with the Maine player's leg vaguely in the vicinity of the Minnesota player who went flying. Now, I've read the USCHO column on it (http://www.uscho.com/news/2002/04/06_004401.php), but maybe someone who watched the game on TV can tell me, since the X wasn't replaying penalties, only goals and scoring opportunities - was this really a trip? The Hauser trips were really trips, and I felt really bad for Maine when they lost.

Granted, they had their chances, and they probably could've done a better job preventing the 6-on-5 tying goal with 53 seconds left. But you've got to hate to see an OT win come on a power play without a serious infraction causing it.

Halfway into the game, before they announced the attendance figures, Mikey asked me what I thought the attendance was, compared to the semifinals. I told him my official guess was 19,324.

Seriously. You can ask him. <mikey@hundred-acre-wood.com>

Attendance: 19,324
Broke all-time records for:

- Attendance at Frozen Four game
- Attendance at college hockey event in Minnesota
- Attendance at any event at the XCel Energy Center

...again.

"Dinkytown"?

I was nowhere near the rioting. Honest.

People Really Love Their Hockey

Originally I had planned to wear my Cornell Hockey sweatshirt to the semis and my Hockey-L sweatshirt to the finals, but it seemed that anybody who wasn't a fan of one of the four teams in the tourney was wearing school colors all weekend, so I did the same (and I also didn't see any other people wearing Hockey-L-wear; I imagine it's just passe at this point). Schools whose paraphernalia I saw at the Frozen Four:

Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, UNH (duh)
Clarkson, Cornell, RPI, Harvard, Air Force, Alaska-Fairbanks, Bowling Green, Ferris State, North Dakota, Boston College, Boston University, Michigan State, UMass-Amherst, UMass-Lowell, Denver, St. Cloud State, Wisconsin

And by the way, the rink food turned out not to be so bad after all; Mikey and I ate dinner there.

Free Money? No, I Couldn't Possibly

For some reason (hmmm...), Delta had overbooked a lot of Sunday's flights out of MSP. They happily paid me $200 in Delta vouchers to put me on a much later, but direct, Northwest flight that would get me to LGA only an hour later than my original itinerary. And you've gotta love living two blocks away from the last stop on NYC's $1.50 bus from LGA, even if it does take 50 minutes.

Let's Go Red!

I'm really looking forward to Buffalo next year, especially if Cornell makes it as I believe they can. I have to wonder what kind of "printing problem" delays the NCAA's lottery forms for several weeks, though. Then again, it might not be such a bad thing that 18,000 Minnesota fans didn't have the opportunity to fill out a lottery form "just for the heck of it." Just so long as they don't forget about my priority code when they send me the form later this week.

There'll be a quiz on this later this week.

Beeeej

Nice diary.

It was definitely a trip...the replay on ESPN showed it clearly. The amount of complaining about that call is staggering.

Thanks, Rich, I appreciate the confirmation. Definitely doesn't excuse the non-calls on Hauser, though.

Beeeej

Jeffrey &quot;Beeeej&quot; Anbinder '94 wrote:

She and our mutual friends Jen Evans '93 and Anastasia Enos '93 were sprinkled throughout the arena for the games, and apparently had been making a habit of going to the Frozen Four for a few years now. So I expect I'll see them in Buffalo, too, and maybe we'll even plan to meet this time.

Is that Jen Evans that was on the women's crew team? I think my sister, Meghan Hayes '95, was friends with her. Small world....

(Not as wierd as when Age and I figured out that he had the hots for my sister's roommate from when he was a prefrosh.)

I'm pretty sure Jen didn't row crew. She was also in marching and pep band (as was Anastasia, before anybody asks if she's the Anastasia Enos who pole-vaulted for Cornell).

Beeeej

Hauser was basically putting on a Hextallian "maul anyone who gets near the crease" display; I assume he was given some latitude because he's a goalie.

The trip that set up the Minnesota PPG basically occurred when the Mainer stuck his leg out and the Gopher had the good sense to go head-over-heels.

For what it's worth, Pi let go what looked like to me interference earlier in the overtime: the Maine player stood up his opposite number at the Maine blueline, and the pass intended for him from the other side of center ice sailed by into the corner for icing. Now, if the icing was whistled, no one touched the puck, so...

Beeeej,

Do you know the name of the former RPI player (Class of '57, I assume) whom you met in St Paul? Comparing the 53-54 roster and the 54-55 roster, the following look like the members of this class: Dick Chiarelli, Pete McArthur, Arnie Perrett, Sloan Sargent, John Stopen, and Mark Lyon.

I'm afraid I stupidly never got his name, but he said he was from New York City originally if that helps.

Beeeej

It eliminates a few who I know to be Canadian. It's too bad that a program from the 54-55 RPI Holiday Tourney which was recently sold on ebay [cgi.ebay.com] isn't open to the RPI roster. Perhaps I'll send a message to Ralph Slate (owner of hockeydb) who bought the item.

To get this back on topic, that was a great trip report. Reminds me of "the good old days" on Hockey-L.

Ned recruited someone from New York City in the early '50s?

That's what the guy said (unless I mentally inserted the "city" part). He's currently living in Philadelphia, not that I expect that to help much...

Beeeej

Al, of course he didn't. That made me think that he must be Mark Lyon who I think was a walk-on.

Hey, Did You Go to Cornell?

Turns out the woman who asked me that as I passed her in the concession hallway at the X was Carol Mullins, the women's hockey coach at Cornell. We had a great chat about the men's season, Schafer's feelings on the season, how the women were doing, and what next year might be like. Coach Mullins wasn't just there for the Frozen Four; it turns out she was headed up to St. Cloud on the off-day for some recruiting. I hope it went well.


Mind elaborating some more on what she said?

Yeah, all, er, both of us women's hockey fans are dying to know.

Seriously - it'd be interesting to see what she has to say about both the men's and the women's teams. The women improved tremendously over the course of this past season, which was a nice change from the past couple of seasons. The big key for the women's team next year will be recruiting. Can they find people to fill the big holes left by the senior class? Due to injuries, only about 4 or 5 of the seniors played regularly this season. However, those seniors logged a lot of minutes, were definitely the heart and soul of that team, and will be hard to replace.

From what Coach Mullins told me, Coach Schafer is extremely proud of his team and what they accomplished, but it's impossible to come as close to the Frozen Four as they did and not make it, and not do a little bit of second-guessing. We didn't get into much detail, which is probably just as well since repeating even this much makes me a bit uncomfortable.

As for the women's team, Coach thinks they look good for next year and she's really looking forward to it.

Beeeej

Rumor has it that there are some good recruits coming in. Also, Bestwick and Murao - two of the top scorers - return. The sophomores (soon to be juniors) greatly improved this year, particularly Allyson Simpson and Anita Khar. The current freshmen, Neremberg and Hannah in particular, are solid, gritty forwards that do a lot of little things right.

The big issue down the line is in net. Next year the women will have two solid senior goaltenders, which is great. Unfortunately, how do you recruit a netminder when she knows that she won't see any time? Cornell could very well wind up with either a talent or an experience problem in net for the 2003-04 season. It'd be great to see a solid frosh goalie come in next fall, but I doubt it'll happen just because of the two established netminders that are already on the squad.

One thing that I've heard about Coach Mullins is that she does a great job of communicating with her recruits, which I'm sure they all appreciate. Hopefully that'll land her some more talented players. Seems like they've all been going to Harvard or Dartmouth lately.

Jeffrey &quot;Beeeej&quot; Anbinder '94 wrote:

Eventually, I think the whining got to him, and he decided he was going to call the next penalty-esque thing he saw: A Maine player and a Minnesota player colliding, with the Maine player's leg vaguely in the vicinity of the Minnesota player who went flying. Now, I've read the USCHO column on it (http://www.uscho.com/news/2002/04/06_004401.php), but maybe someone who watched the game on TV can tell me, since the X wasn't replaying penalties, only goals and scoring opportunities - was this really a trip? The Hauser trips were really trips, and I felt really bad for Maine when they lost.

Granted, they had their chances, and they probably could've done a better job preventing the 6-on-5 tying goal with 53 seconds left. But you've got to hate to see an OT win come on a power play without a serious infraction causing it.

From my perspective (I've posted this on USCHO but I'll quickly repeat it here), it seemed like a clear leg-on-leg hit, and those have high injury potential (see: Cam Neely, Joe Nieuwendyk, Radek Dvorak). I think it was the right call for that reason.

Jeff,

Can you comment on and add hints and tips for those of us who are Frozen Four in-experienced on how best to attempt to get some tickets to Buffalo next spring?

thanks -

Lou,

To be honest, I'm not sure - I'm one of the lucky ones who'd had tickets to the FF for a couple of years before they started doing the lottery by priority, so I may never really have to worry about it again. But my best advice would be to keep checking [www.ncaachampionships.com] as often as you can in the days leading up to April 22 (which is when they say the application will be available online to the public), and fill out your application ASAP.

Your next best bet - or perhaps even a better one - would be to latch onto someone who has priority and orders tickets every year, and ask them to include you. For instance Mikey has already claimed one of my three other tickets to Buffalo next year, and I certainly have ideas about who would get first dibs at the other two if they didn't already have tickets and Cornell was in the semis.

Beyond that, USCHO.com and eBay both seem to be reliable methods of finding tickets that are available because someone's team didn't make it; the only question there is whether you'll have to spend more than face value (and note that NY state's scalping laws mean that people won't be able to sell FF tix on eBay legally for more than 10% over face value [and eBay's watchdog mechanism for such things has become much more sophisticated], so it may be that much harder to find tix that haven't already been bid up to the max). And of course it means waiting until relatively the last minute.

Remember, there's a bit of a disadvantage to getting your tickets through the lottery; they charge your credit card ten months in advance of the tourney.

Beeeej

While the OT infraction may have been a penalty, early in that PP Hauser clearly clothes-lined a Maine player with the top half of his stick as the Maine player was skating aroung the net. Unfortunately that wasn't called, as I would've liked us to have a shot at knocking off the defending national champs next December.