As Hockey East schedule announcement looms, UMass ramping up preseason approach

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.