Tyler Russo, Max Dineen and Ryland Randle were walking to class last spring. They were on alert.
Paul Pearl, then Cushing’s head coach, had just texted the team to arrive at a team meeting later that day, which was abnormal for late March.
The trio of then-Cushing juniors figured out why a meeting was scheduled: One of them came across a Dexter Southfield Instagram post announcing the hiring of Pearl as its next athletic director.
Russo, Dineen and Randle quickly headed for their head coach’s office. Pearl had arrived as Cushing’s head coach in 2021. A quick exit just three years later came as a surprise.
“Oh, my God,” Pearl told them. “I’m so sorry, guys. This isn’t how I wanted you to find out.”
Pearl went ahead with the meeting at 3 p.m. He had the next year’s projected roster on the board. While high-end talent was coming in like always, the Penguins also would be a much younger team in 2024-25. They didn’t know it at the time, but four of the players on the board who were slated to come in the fall did not.
The rising seniors returned to the dorms and immediately called a meeting of the returners. A number of them were committed and could head to junior hockey. Some did — UNH commit Kole Hyles and Merrimack commit Luke Goukler both opted to leave Cushing.
But Russo, Dineen, Randle and several others came to a definitive conclusion: They wanted to stay.
“We owe it to the guys that have been here before us,” Russo, the team captain for 2024-25, said. “We want to win a championship. This is our senior year. This is the time to do it.”
The next step was finding a new head coach. Despite the Central Mass. Penguins (Cushing’s split-season team) being off at USA Hockey nationals, Cushing included Russo, Randle and Dineen in the head coaching interviews. The three sat and listened to each interview on Zoom.
The trio of players reacted the same when Ryan Bourque’s interview was finished.
“We weren’t saying anything on the call, of course,” Russo said. “But we got off the call and all FaceTimed each other because we were in different hotel rooms. We’re like, ‘This is our guy.’ ”
Bourque was hired in late April and immediately got to work. He went to Cushing from 2005-07 before moving on to the U.S. National Team Development Program. After two seasons in the QMJHL, he embarked on a nine-year career in pro hockey. He retired in 2021 and immediately became an assistant coach for the ECHL’s South Carolina Stingrays before heading back to do a year as an assistant with the NTDP in 2023-24.
It had been a while since Bourque was in the prep world.
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“When you get from level to level, you have to recalibrate what you’re watching,” Bourque said. “That was part of the challenge this year with prep as a whole. I played in prep a long time ago, but it’s come a really long way since.”
Bourque was stepping into a good situation. While young, the strength of the team was undoubtedly on defense. Russo, a Minnesota State commit, and Randle, committed to Arizona State, were back. Michigan State commit Tommy Bleyl and St. Lawrence commit Kristopher Richards both kept their word and arrived at Cushing in the fall.
In net, Maksim Corovic, a highly touted, 6-foot-2 junior from Ontario, showed up despite being recruited by a different coach. They were to be a defensive team.
“No, not at all,” Corovic said of whether he thought about not going to Cushing due to the coaching change. “I wanted to be a Penguin right away. Especially when I heard Ryan Bourque was going to be coach, too. That was pretty cool.”
It was different up front. In previous years, there were big-time players like Boston College commit Landan Resendes, UConn forward Ethan Gardula, Hyles and Goukler.
There was none of that “star” power entering this season. They were well-aware.
“As one of the returning forwards with Axel (Favreau), (Alex Gomes) and Eric Lund, that put a fire in us,” Dineen said. “We came together and said we’ve got to step up this year. We’ve got to take it from here.”
Things weren’t easy once the prep season started. The Penguins lost their first two games — a 4-1 loss at Phillips Andover and a 5-2 defeat at Dexter Southfield. They looked far from an Elite 8 champion, let alone a contender.
“When I look back, that was probably the best thing that could have happened to us,” Bourque said.
There were still more tough times to be had. Cushing fell to Holderness in a shootout and St. Andrew’s College at the Groton-Lawrence Tournament. Then came a stretch in the second half of January where Cushing lost four of seven, falling to Salisbury, Deerfield, Winchendon and Phillips Exeter.
“What was really eye-opening was after our Exeter game, we were in the locker room and we’re like, ‘Wow, we’re probably about one or two losses away from not making it,’ ” Russo said. “And that was pretty early on in the season.”
Russo and his teammates didn’t know that two turning points were coming.
The first was that Corovic had been playing with pneumonia for a couple of weeks. He started to feel sick around the Thayer game on Jan. 22. The Exeter game was the breaking point.
“It got to a point where I just couldn’t play anymore,” Corovic said.
He spent two weeks getting treated. In the meantime, senior goalie Zach White, a backup last year and this season, stepped in. He made 29 saves to tie Tilton, 4-4, and then stopped 15 shots to beat Vermont Academy, 7-2.
“Everyone believed in him,” Russo said.
Then came the next turning point. On Feb. 12, Cushing traveled to play Brunswick at Sacred Heart. Fortunately for Cushing, Sacred Heart allowing the Penguins to use their video room before the game fundamentally changed their season.
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Bourque showed his team a two-minute-long video of former Navy Seal and podcaster Jocko Willink talking about facing adversity. The message of the video: When something bad happens, say, “Good.”
Corovic was out for that game against Brunswick, one of the highest-ranking teams in prep at the time. So, too, was Bleyl.
Cushing’s response? Good.
White made 20 saves and the Penguins shut Brunswick out, 5-0.
“I feel like we stuck by that motto from that point on,” Dineen said. “We went on a streak there.”
They did go on a streak. They beat St. Mark’s with White making 31 saves. Eventually, Corovic was back to normal and guided the Penguins to wins over Canterbury, Phillips Andover, Kimball Union, New Hampton and Governor’s. In two weeks, Cushing went from outside the top 16 in JSPR (the algorithm used to pick the Elite 8) to one of the top seeds.
In the middle of that, forward Joseph Covelluzzi, a sophomore ’09, got hurt. He was the team’s second-leading scorer.
“We used that as motivation,” Dineen said. “Everybody bought in.”
Dineen stepped up, finishing the regular season with 23 goals and 52 points. Gomes, Lund and Favreau provided a lot of depth scoring.
One of the other big developments was the play on defense. Randle and Bleyl jump-started the offense, while Russo and Richards were shutdown forces.
“For us to win, they were the most important part of our team,” Bourque said. “It’s no secret the last month of the season, they were our rock back there and they were able to dominate games.”
That streak continued into the Elite 8. Brunswick led for roughly one minute of its game with Cushing, as the Penguins won, 6-3. No. 1 Deerfield never led against Cushing, losing 4-1.
But there was more to its Elite 8 championship matchup with Dexter.
Not only was Dexter the No. 1 team for most of the season, but Cushing had also been to the previous two Elite 8 finals and lost both. Those teams were more talented on paper and lost fewer games throughout their seasons. The Penguins entered the 2023 and 2024 tournaments as the No. 1 seed.
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There was one key difference between this team and the last two teams: This one had been through the mud multiple times.
“Being battle-tested is really the most important thing for a group,” Bourque said. “You need to know how to handle adversity.”
So when Dexter scored the first goal of the game, the Penguins scored roughly two minutes later to tie it. Cushing entered the third period with a 2-1 lead, but gave up a 5-on-3 goal 29 seconds into the final frame. Five minutes later, Dexter led 3-2.
“Last year, we would go down in a game, which wasn’t really common for us, and everybody would get down and everybody would think we’re done and that we were going to lose this game,” Dineen said. “This year we would go down and everybody would be saying, ‘How are we going to win?’ We all stuck to the plan and bought in.”
It paid off. Midway through the third period, Gomes tied the game on a shot from out high. Dineen netted the eventual game-winner with just over three minutes to play. Junior forward Cam McDonough threw a puck on net that bounced out to Dineen, who finished the rebound.
“That was crazy,” Dineen said of his goal. “I was just crashing the net and drawing the defenseman back and somehow (the puck) just popped out. I don’t know if it took a weird bounce but it was pretty lucky.”
They weren’t out of the woods yet. With just over a minute left in the game and Dexter goalie Colin Davis pulled for the extra skater, McDonough threw the puck down the ice and into the empty net. The Cushing student section exploded into cheers, screams and yells.
But the referee emphatically waved the “no goal” sign with his arms. Corovic had accidentally knocked the net off, causing the goal to be disallowed.
Russo had been jumping up and down when the puck first went in and quickly reverted to putting his hands on his head in disbelief when it wasn’t counted.
Then the message that turned his team’s season around quickly rose to the surface.
“Guys,” he said to his fellow teammates on the ice. “Good. They disallowed that goal? Good.”
It whipped the Penguins back into shape. They held strong for the final minute, weathering Dexter’s best. That included Corovic going post-to-post to make a phenomenal one-timer save on Dexter forward Joe Marchi.
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“That was probably the most unbelievable save of his life,” Russo said.
Seconds later, the Penguins finally were Elite 8 champs. It was the culmination of having gone through a lot throughout the season for most of the group.
But for Russo and Favreau, the lone players on both of the last two teams that lost, it was different.
“It was honestly nothing like I’ve ever felt before,” Russo said. “Just like an out-of-body experience. I honestly just wanted to cry tears of joy. Just for that sense of relief.”
