College Hockey Update:  North Dakota outlasted Denver in a gritty, initially defensively-dominated, see-saw battle in the second game of the Frozen Four semi-finals last night in Tampa, Florida.  The first period was really an odd duck of a hockey game, with only four shots on goal taken by each team.

But in the second, North Dakota sprung to life and looked for quite a while as though there would be no stopping them for the rest of the night.  One minute into the period, Drake Caggiula got North Dakota on the board after he managed to slip behind the Denver defense, turn a nice pass from his teammate Boeser into a rush on the goal, and get his shot past Denver goalie Tanner Jaillet.  Only five minutes later Caggiula was able to take the puck away from a Denver defender along the boards,  skate to the goal, and sneak a quick wrister past Jaillet.  And it looked like the rout was on!  But not to be the case.  Denver responded by tightening up their defense, and in the last several minutes of the period it seemed that North Dakota had the confidence that the game was fully in hand and when they managed to get the puck back from Denver when in their own zone, they began simply shooting the puck down to the end of the ice, creating a number of face-offs in their own zone on all of the icing calls.  By the end of the second, Denver seemed to come to life, going into the break down 2-0.

In the third period North Dakota’s style of play continued, as did Denver’s turnaround that started in the end of the second.  Three minutes into the period, a face-off win went to Will Butcher, and he scored the first goal of the night for Denver, making it a 2-1 game.  North Dakota seemed content to milk their one goal lead, and with nine minutes left in the game, Denver made them pay for that when Matt VanVoorhis shot from the side of the goal, sending the puck into the stick of a North Dakota defender, and it ricocheted off and went under North Dakota goalie Cam Johnson and in for the goal, to tie it at two apiece.  At this point, North Dakota decided it might be best to stop icing the puck when they got it away from Denver in their own zone.  The game became  a dogfight and the as time went on, North Dakota had the momentum, so much so that Denver resorted to North Dakota’s earlier icing of the puck when they could get it away from the Hawks in the Denver zone, apparently trying to get out of regulation for a break and a fresh-start in OT.  But on an icing-generated face-off in the Denver zone, with only a minute left in the game, Nick Schmaltz skated across the front of the goal, from right to left, and the right-hander back-handed in a beautiful shot past Jaillet for the game-winning goal, making it 3-2 with a few ticks less than a minute remaining.  Denver pulled Jaillet and added an extra attacker, and with only a few seconds remaining, North Dakota’s Rhett Gardner, from deep in the North Dakota zone, cleared the puck all the way down the ice, and it crept into the empty net for the final score of 4-2, North Dakota.

North Dakota advances to play Quinnipiac on Saturday, April 9th, at 5:00pm Pacific Time on ESPN2, in what looks like it should be a whopper of a championship game.

This result was not an upset, I suppose, if you consider that eleven people in the pool picked North Dakota to win this game, and none picked Denver to do so.  On the other hand, that’s only eleven out of forty-eight, where twenty-three had picked St. Cloud State to be here, so it just might be considered an upset of sorts.

Also a note on the Quinnipiac outcome in the earlier game — I didn’t write this initially in that post, but I just added it about fifteen minutes ago — the Quinnipiac win yesterday was not an upset in our pool, as thirty out of forty-eight participants picked Quinnipiac to win that semifinal game and advance to the championship game.

That’s all for now.  Stay tuned, and go college hockey!

— Tom