College Hockey Update:  Well it’s here; the second semifinal between #6 Denver and #4 Massachusetts will start now, at 5:30PM Pacific Time (about ten minutes after the time of this posting) on ESPN2.

Now, Denver was the 2017 NCAA Champion, they are the #6 ranked team in the country, and they are an eight-time NCAA champion, having won five times before 1970, and then in 2004, 2005, and 2017.  They have been to the NCAA Tournament thirty times, and this is their twelfth time in a row since 2008; this is their seventeenth Frozen Four (third in the last four years), and they’ve made it to the final game eleven times (only losing three of them, all three prior to 1974).  You could call this stale blood or even old blood, I suppose.  By contrast, Massachusetts is quite an upstart — very fresh blood in this picture.  UMass has only made one trip to the NCAA Tournament before this year, winning one game in 2007; they have tripled their NCAA Tournament win total with  the two wins they have so far in this year’s tournament!  So . . . . this is their first Frozen Four.

Massachusetts is 30-9-0, 7-3 in their last ten games, and ranked #4 in the country.  They have seven who have scored goals in the double digits:  Chaffee with seventeen; Makar and Pritchard with sixteen each; Leonard with fifteen; DelGaizo and Trivigno with twelve each; and Boeing with ten.

Denver is 24-11-5, 6-3-1 in their last ten games, and rankd #4 in the country.  They have a trio who have scored goals in double digits:  Lukosevicius with nineteen; Finlay with sixteen; and Guttman with twelve.

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

— Tom