Five of the six New England teams that qualified for the NCAA tournament had their seasons end in opening-round games. Only Quinnipiac moved to the second round.
But more than one win wasn’t in the cards for the Bobcats, who, like American International, ran into the buzzsaw that is Michigan, which beat AIC 5-3 on Friday and Quinnipiac 7-4 on Sunday in Allentown, Pa.
The Wolverines team with a record seven first-round draft picks and four of the top five from 2021 — including No. 1 overall pick Owen Power on defense and the likes of Matty Beniers (Hingham, Mass.) and Bruins prospect Johnny Beecher up front — will join Minnesota, Minnesota State and Denver at the Frozen Four in Boston. Harvard, Northeastern, UMass and UMass Lowell were the other New England schools that could not escape the first round.
“I think when you fast forward the tape in five or seven years, you may be looking at one of the greatest college hockey teams ever assembled,” AIC coach Eric Lang said of Michigan. “It certainly felt like that for the first five to seven minutes as our guys adjusted to the pace, but I thought we got better as the game went along. … I’m as proud of our group coming out of this game than any game we’ve won all season.”
On Friday against St. Cloud, Quinnipiac junior defenseman Jayden Lee scored with 11:23 left in regulation and All-Tournament Team forward Ethan de Jong had a goal and two assists to keep Quinnipiac’s seventh tournament appearance alive for another game.
The Bobcats hadn’t allowed more than three goals in any game all season entering the tournament, but freshman goaltender Yaniv Perets and his defense were tested at a new level against both St. Cloud and Michigan. His 30 saves against the former opponent set a career high.
“We haven’t had those kinds of issues all season long,” Quinnipiac’s Rand Pecknold, the back-to-back ECAC Hockey Coach of the Year, said on Friday. “We had a two-game set with North Dakota which we split but dominated both nights. We’ve played some good teams. … That was probably one of our worst games of the year, but we found a way. In some respects, that’s the mark of a good team. … We hung (Perets) out to dry on a couple, uncharacteristic of us.”
Michigan jumped out to a 4-0 lead with two goals in both Sunday’s first and second periods. The Bobcats roared back for three in the third thanks to Lee, senior Wyatt Bongiovanni and Desi Burgart, but three empty-net goals allowed the top-seeded team to pull away late.
The Bobcats’ 32 wins this season tied a program record.
On Thursday, AIC hung tough in the 5-3 loss, cutting into 2-0 and 4-1 deficits and getting a power-play goal from junior Blake Bennett in the third period. But the Yellow Jackets fell short of another upset victory in their third-ever NCAA appearance. Still, they finished with 20 wins for the third time in four seasons.
Bennett and graduate transfers Justin Young and Brian Rigali scored for AIC.
Bennett finished the year with 19 goals and 34 points, moving into second place on the program’s single-season scoring list; he logged eight goals and four assists in his last four postseason games.
Just a year ago, he wasn’t even on the team’s postseason travel roster. Now, he’s setting records.
“I’m not surprised he elevates when the ice gets hard and the games get big,” Lang said. “... He’s a guy that kind of persevered in our program. … We left him behind (last postseason) because he wasn’t in the condition we want a Division 1 athlete to be. Blake was going to have to get serious about his conditioning level or move on, but he looked me in the eyes and said, ‘That’s what I’m going to do.’ … He should never look back because he’s unbelievably talented.”
The AIC club has won a lot of hockey games both this season — 22 on the way to Atlantic Hockey regular-season and tournament titles — and throughout the careers of fifth-year seniors like Chris Dodero, Luka Maver and Justin Cole.
“We’ve got guys that play with integrity and honor,” Lang said. “... In this day and age of the transfer portal or the grass is greener, these guys hung with us when they could have played somewhere else. But, they wanted to represent little old AIC in Springfield, Massachusetts.”
“From day one stepping in that room, I've never been part of a group and culture as great as this one,” Dodero said. “When I had the opportunity to come back for a fifth year, you can guarantee I was taking that one.”
Another Crimson comeback falls short
For better or for worse, coming back from a multiple-goal deficit was nothing new to Harvard.
In Thursday’s Albany Regional semifinal against Minnesota State, the Crimson battled back from a 3-0 deficit as sophomore Sean Farrell (Hopkinton, Mass.) and freshman Alex Gaffney scored in a 48-second span late in the second period. The Mavericks answered, but so too did senior captain Casey Dornbach whose goal with 3:30 left made it a one-goal game again.
In the end, it just wasn’t enough. The Mavericks earned a 4-3 win, keeping them on their way to clinching a second straight Frozen Four berth.
“I couldn’t be more proud of our team,” Harvard coach Ted Donato said. “I thought we stayed with it. I thought we came out a bit tentative in the first half of the game, maybe because of inexperience and some just the execution level that Minnesota State had. We never gave up. The guys kept playing. That’s happened to us a few times down the stretch.”
Like Donato said, the ECAC Hockey champions had been there before. They weren’t able to completely replicate the magic of scoring three extra-attacker goals in less than four minutes and then winning in overtime against RPI to begin their best-of-three playoff series on March 11.
Both postseason games were both part of an outstanding late-year stretch over which the Crimson went 12-4-2.
The three Harvard goals during Thursday’s loss were the most Minnesota State had allowed since Jan. 29 against Arizona State, the fifth game of their 17-game win streak.
As a result, confidence was never lost.
“It just shows the resilience of this group that we’ve had all year. It’s the best team I’ve been a part of at Harvard,” Dornbach said. “I think we all wanted to do it for each other and obviously fell short tonight. … We have a lot to be proud of in this room for how young we were and how many people probably wrote us off.”
