The UMass Minutemen hope celebration scenes such as this are on the horizon, with Hockey East news pending. (Getty Images)
It’s been 245 days since the University of Massachusetts played a live, meaningful hockey game. Sometimes, with everything going on in the world, it feels like even longer than that, especially for a team that was on a mission to prove itself in 2019-20 coming off its first-ever trip to the national championship game the year before.
On that particular night, March 5, UMass — then ranked eighth in the national polls and poised for second straight appearance in the NCAA tournament — pitched a 1-0 shutout over the last-place Vermont Catamounts, locking up the second seed for the Hockey East tournament, just one week before it was set to unfold.
But — spoiler alert — that tournament, and anything to come after it, never happened.
