During Friday’s Mason Cup Championship, Groll got to hang on to a precious moment as he scored an empty-netter to clinch a 4-2 victory over rival St. Thomas and win the Mavericks’ third Cup in four years. He was happy that there was a little less pressure on the line for him to score this time around.

“Thankfully, our team was in a really good spot and it didn’t matter if I scored or not,” he said with a smile. “(Evan) Murr put the game-winner in before me. There was no pressure this time to make sure it counted, but it felt great. Having (Adam) Eisele hold me up like Simba and going around was really cool and saluting the crowd was fun after that. Just having the breath of fresh air and that relief after scoring was great, especially in a tight moment like that in the playoffs when everyone is kind of gripping their sticks a little bit. It gets everyone’s shoulders a little less tense.”

Things may have seemed a little tense heading into the third period as the game was tied 2-2, but Mavericks coach Luke Strand said that there wasn’t any stress in the Mankato locker room during the period break.

“Going into the third, there was a neat feeling in the room,” he said. “There was zero panic and very comfortable being an even game. I don’t think you take moments like this for granted, and that’s the maturity of this, this group.”

UST’s Chase Foley skates with the puck with Minnesota State’s Zach Krajnik behind him in their game on March 21, 2025. (MHM Photo / Ryan Stieg)

While the Mavericks were all smiles, the Tommies’ mood was significantly different. UST rolled into the game on an eight-game winning streak and was arguably the hottest team in the nation at puck drop. However, the Tommies fell one game short of being able to hang a CCHA Championship banner in their new arena next fall.

“I definitely feel for all the seniors and the age-outs,” Tommies captain Lucas Wahlin said. “They deserve better obviously. I’m going to be kicking myself for sure a little bit, and I’m definitely going to miss a lot of those boys, especially my linemates (Liam Malmquist and Matthew Gleason). It’s tough. They battled their hearts out and a lot of those guys stepped up when we needed them. You could see it tonight with goals from Gleason and Liam, two guys that won’t be here next year that gave it their all. (Jake) Sibell in net, I just feel bad for those boys. Hopefully next year, we can have a better outcome.”

When reflecting on the season as a whole, it was clear that Tommies coach Rico Blasi was proud of what his team accomplished during its big second half run that earned it home ice in the first round of the CCHA Tournament and a home semifinal win.

“There’s not too many teams in the country that go 15-4-1 in the last 20 games,” he said. “Led by the guy to my left (Wahlin), who drives our bus every day in practice and in games. This is what we play for. This is what St. Thomas hockey is going to be about. Playing for championships. So, everything that we do in our process from day to day will be geared toward that, on and off the ice.

“Our culture is in a really good place, our leadership group is in a good place. Our identity is what it is, and I don’t think we’re going to change that. There’s a lot of people that wrote us off at Christmas time, but this team buckled down and came together. They understood their roles and believed in each other. We have a saying in our locker room, Faith in Brother, and there’s a lot of meaning to that. Obviously, there’s faith in something bigger than ourselves, but also faith in each other and that’s what this team has and that’s where our program is at.”

An even game between the Tommies and Mavericks
The first period was evenly played overall. The Mavericks came out with a little more jump in their skates as the puck spent the majority of the first half of the period in the Tommies’ zone. However, as the period went on, things started to even out. There weren’t many high-quality scoring chances for either team, so the goalies weren’t tested much. However, they both made saves when they had to, and the score was 0-0 after 1.

Things were a different story in the second period as both teams started to get into a groove offensively. UST got on the scoreboard first on a great individual effort by Gleason. The senior forward collected a loose puck by the side boards, skated in hard and beat Mavericks goalie Alex Tracy blocker-side at the 6:56 mark.

UST defenseman Chase Cheslock chases a Minnesota State player with the puck in the CCHA Championship game on March 21, 2025. (MHM Photo / Ryan Stieg)

“I think that was a big confidence booster for our squad,” Wahlin said. “I would say that was our goal coming out. They obviously came out the first 10 minutes and gave us their best, so props to them. We kind of punched back the last 10 minutes of the first and we ended up getting our first goal of the game, which was huge for us. It brought our squad a lot of confidence and that was what we were looking for. We kind of came into the game with that confidence of ‘Hey, we’re going to score first’ and that was our mentality. We didn’t really get the bounces that we wanted to, so props to Minnesota State.”

However, Mankato answered back on the power play at 10:40. After UST was called for tripping, Mavs center Luigi Benincasa got a cross-ice pass from Rhett Pitlick and beat Sibell glove-side to tie the game at 2-1. The Mavericks then took the lead at 13:14 on a goal by Kaden Bohlsen. With Sibell trying to cover the puck, it squirted free and Bohlsen tapped it into the open net to make it 2-1.

The Tommies wouldn’t go away though. After the Mavs were called for interference, Malmquist brought the puck into the slot and toward the right post where he snapped it past Tracy to tie things up at 2-2 going into the third. That was Malmquist’s 20th goal of the season, which currently leads the CCHA, and his league-leading 45th point.

Things remained tight and a back-and-forth affair throughout the third period. The Mavericks grabbed the lead at 10:13 thanks to a shot by Murr. The CCHA Defenseman of the Year fired a shot from the point that beat Sibell to the far post to put Mankato up 3-2. The Tommies got a couple of good chances to tie the game, but Tracy denied them both. UST was also unable to pull Sibell for the extra attacker until 45 seconds were left in the period thanks to some good pressure from the Mavs, and then Groll finished off the win with his empty-net goal.

The post Mavs Win Mason Cup appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.

When the University of Minnesota concluded its interconference rivalry series against Minnesota Duluth in early November, the Bulldogs rallied from a 3-1 deficit in AMSOIL Arena with a spirited third-period rally, which forced overtime. Nobody scored in the overtime, so the game went to a three-player shootout, which UMD won when Quinn Olson and Ben Steeves scored and UMD goaltender Matthew Thiessen stopped the first two Golden Gopher shooters, giving UMD a 4-3 victory in the game.

But that was in the view of all the players on both sides, and the 7,345 fans who saw UMD bounce back from a 5-1 loss in Minneapolis the previous evening to gain a split with their long-time rival. That’s what they saw happen in front of them, so that’s what they took home with them, even though the NCAA counts the game as a tie, for purposes of nationwide rankings.

No matter, Minnesota coach Bob Motzko treated the loss as though it had been a tie game, which is the same attitude he had after the Gophers lost shootouts against Michigan and at UMD. The fans and players know better, of course, but they also know that sometimes what you see is not what you get.

College hockey lives in its own world, and in Minnesota, we’re lucky to have six Division I programs and they participate in three of the best college hockey conferences in the country with the NCHC, Big Ten and the CCHA. Plus, we have the WCHA that is now strictly for women’s hockey. The NCAA leaves it up to the leagues to decide how to treat their ties, and they can award an important extra point to a shootout winner. But in non-conference games, it is closer to mass confusion.

You could make the case that if we as observers aren’t sure what rules they’re going by, maybe the coaches and the officials of the different conferences aren’t sure, either.

Hailey MacLeod was engulfed by her teammates after recording her first UMD shutout, 3-0. She came back to anchor a 1-1 tie in the second game. (MHM Photo / John Gilbert)

UMD women have strong showing vs. No. 2 Colgate
We can gather a unique bit of evidence at Duluth’s AMSOIL Arena, where the UMD women’s team last weekend was host to Colgate, the No. 2 team in the nation which brought a 12-game winning streak to the Head of the Lakes. UMD played its best game of the season, winning the first game 3-0 behind Hailey MacLeod’s first shutout for the Bulldogs.

In the second game, Colgate played much more intense. But UMD turned it up, too, and took a 1-0 lead into the third period. After their second straight strong showing, the Bulldogs seemed ready to clinch the sweep when Colgate’s Kristýna Kaltounková was penalized at 18:58 of the the third period.

A power play for the final 1:02 seemed to secure the victory. But in the last-minute scrap for possession behind their own net, the Bulldogs botched the breakout control, and the puck suddenly popped out to the right circle. Red Raiders right defenseman Allyson Simpson read the play perfectly, moved in from the right point and got her full force on a shot that MacLeod couldn’t block.

The stunning tie defied the five-minute, 3-on-3 overtime, so it was time for a shootout. But as the few fans waited for what would be the highlight of the game, the teams broke off into handshake lines and headed for their dressing rooms, and left the game unsettled at 1-1.

“It’s the choice of the home team,” said UMD coach Maura Crowell. “We don’t have to have one, and it’s up to the home team. I didn’t like the way the game was going at the end, so we chose to not have the shootout.”

St. Cloud State men’s team hosts Michigan 
Let’s switch our attention to the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center in St. Cloud, with the only remaining full Olympic-size 200-by-100 foot ice surface. The Huskies had come out of a tough preseason stretch and welcomed Michigan to town last weekend. The Wolverines had earlier lost a shootout to Ohio State and beaten Minnesota in another. Michigan beat the Huskies 2-0 in the first game and grabbed a 3-0 lead in the second game. 

Colgate’s Allyson Simpson (10) scored the only Red Raiders goal of the weekend against UMD goaltender Hailey MacLeod, shorthanded with 44 seconds remaining, for a 1-1 tie that fueled a debate about mandatory shootouts. (MHM Photo / John Gilbert)

“I thought we played really good all weekend,” said St. Cloud State coach Brett Larson. “We hit a pipe and three crossbars the first game and just couldn’t put one in.”

In that second game, Veeti Miettinen scored a shorthanded goal to cut the deficit to 3-1 late in the second period, and Kyler Kupka scored a power-play goal early in the third to trim it to 3-2. With the goalie pulled at the finish, Kupka scored again with 0:07 remaining, sending the big crowd into a frenzy and forcing overtime. Five minutes, 3-on-3, and still 3-3. Time for a shootout, and each team scored. Kupka scored yet again for the winner.

“In conference play, you get an extra point,” Larson said. “In non-conference, you get nothing, but everybody on both teams and all the fans in the building knew that we won the game.”

I told Larson what had just transpired in the Duluth women’s game, where Crowell said she didn’t want to have a shootout and as home team coach, her decision ruled.

“We were told we had no choice,” Larson said. “We were told we had to have a shootout against Michigan. But here’s a crazy thing: A few weeks ago we played in Mankato, and Luke Strand, their coach, and I talked it over and said we had to agree. So we agreed that if we tied, we would have a shootout. As it turned out, we did tie the second game but they beat us in overtime.”

So, incredible as it may sound, three distinct games involving St. Cloud State’s men and UMD’s women exposed three completely different concepts of how to decide a tie game. And nobody seems to be prepared to change what they did. Well, except for UMD.

“I had long conversation with our commissioner of the WCHA,” Crowell said. “She told me we had to have the shootout and should have had it against Colgate. I told her I never understood it that way, but we’ll do it from now on.”

That’s a relief. So from now on, college coaches realize they can have the glass have full, or the glass half empty, but they no longer can tip the glass over and leave the result spilling onto the floor.

Coming up
UMD’s women, who just ran a gauntlet by facing Minnesota and Colgate on back to back series, heads for Wisconsin and a rare Saturday-Sunday series against the league-favorite Badgers. While Minnesota is at home trying to avert an upset against Bemidji State. Two other Minnesota rivals, Minnesota State Mankato and St. Thomas, will play a home-and-home series. St. Cloud State hits the road to face No. 1 ranked Ohio State in Columbus.

The men are scattered around, too, with Minnesota at Penn State for a Big Ten series, St. Thomas is at Ferris State in a CCHA series, while MSU-Mankato is at Lake Superior State in another. UMD comes back from a bye week to play host to Omaha.

The Gophers have found consistency an elusive target this season, and they found out Michigan State was for real in the Big Ten last weekend when they lost 4-3 in a shootout opener on Friday. They had a 5-3 lead at Mariucci Arena on Sunday afternoon, but the Spartans came back for two in the last five minutes to forge a 5-5 tie. This time, Jimmy Clark scored at 3:58 of the sudden-death, five-minute overtime to lift the Gophers to a 6-5 victory.

The first game? Forget it. That was a shootout, when the Gophers built leads of 1-0, 2-1 and 3-2, only to have the Spartans come back for a tie, then won it in overtime. Or was it a tie. It was both, depending on your point of view and the rules used that night.

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But wait. For the current 2023-24 season a sixth Minnesota Division I program has vaulted into immediate contention, with the University of St. Thomas opening the season with a startling split with St. Cloud State and taking the then-No. 1 ranked Gophers to overtime before falling 6-5 before more than 11,000 fans at Xcel Energy Center.

The WCHA is, of course, no longer in operation. It shattered when Minnesota went off to help start a Big Ten hockey conference, prompting Minnesota-Duluth and St. Cloud State to start up with the new, and supremely powerful, National Collegiate Hockey Conference (NCHC) and leaving MSU-Mankato and Bemidji State in what was left of the WCHA. That league changed its name to the CCHA, recapturing the Central Collegiate Hockey Association call letters forced by Michigan when it branched off from the WCHA to form its “bus league.”

While St. Thomas, under proven mastermind Rico Blasi as head coach, raised all its sports to Division I status, nobody expected the Tommies to be the surprise of the state’s college hockey stalwarts this quickly.

Sophomore Ben Steeves scored a shootout goal as UMD solved a 2-2 tie with Michigan Tech. (MHM Photo / John Gilbert)

Regardless, we have to turn back to Minnesota Duluth to find the new king of bargain promotions in college hockey. The Bulldogs started off this season unbeaten through three games, while giving their fans the benefit of a bargain for their ticket prices. In two of their first three games, the Bulldogs skated to ties, then through scoreless overtimes, and then through shootouts before prevailing to turn those deadlocks into symbolic victories.

A young student, new to big-time hockey, saw the teams prepare for the shootout after UMD and Michigan Tech tied 2-2 in the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame game and asked: “Do they get a point if they win the shootout?” He was told no, that there was no tangible benefit, no points, no indication of winning, but only giving the fans the satisfaction of seeing the game end in something other than a tie.

He was unimpressed at the answer, but as the shootout saw Ben Steeves score a goal, and then freshman Anthony Menghini clinch it 2-1, the fans, all of whom stood in their AMSOIL Arena seats, erupted with a roar that would do a league playoff championship proud. The young man acknowledged, “OK, now I get it.”

A week later, in their first official non-conference game against Northern Michigan, UMD started with a 3-0 lead before allowing three unanswered goals and needing to rally to go back ahead 4-3 on Steeve’s second goal of the night, then fell behind 5-4. That left it up to Menghini, the freshman, to score another pivotal goal, tying the game 5-5 with 2:58 remaining. Then the Bulldogs and Wildcats sparred through six rounds of the shootout before Matthew Perkins, another freshman, scored to claim another 2-1 shutout victory. Again, however, it was not a victory, just an official tie. But don’t tell the 5,947 screaming fans that!

They went home happy and, thanks to the return of a previous promotional deal with area Culver’s restaurants, every fan turning in a ticket stub whenever UMD scores five goals or more gets a free scoop of frozen custard. How can you beat having extra-time hockey and free frozen custard after your team won the game — as far as you’re concerned.

The next night, UMD kept rolling through Northern Michigan in a second penalty-fest that saw a repeat of double-digit penalty calls with each team scoring three power-play goals and the Bulldogs getting an 8-5 victory and a sweep.

“These are games that test your inner strength,” UMD coach Scott Sandelin said afterward. “I thought we handled the adversity a little better tonight than in the first game, and fortunately our power play was clicking.”

Fears of struggling to score were washed away in that series sweep, thanks to Steeves and a couple of freshmen, starting a trend that seems to have engaged the whole team, which Sandelin will welcome as he tries to take his team off to the NCAA tournament in quest of his fourth national title at UMD.

Snuggerud is back for the Gophers
Down Interstate 35 a couple of hours, Bob Motzko has assembled a flashy crop of talent led by Jimmy Snuggerud, who started off hot after several of his classmates turned pro after last season’s near miss at NCAA time. Motzko got his way by narrowing the Olympic-sized, 200-by-100-foot ice sheet at 3M Arena at Mariucci to a hybrid width, now 200-by-89 feet. With an inability to use the wider ice surface favored by the late Herb Brooks and Doug Woog to win his first national title with a dressing room filled with NHL draft choices, maybe a narrower rink will help.

At the start, Snuggerud made the plan work. After scoring the overtime winner against upstart St. Thomas to climax a rally from a 4-2 deficit in the third period, Snuggerud brought his teammates back to Mariucci for the second game and scored twice for a 2-0 lead that the Gophers expanded with an empty-net goal for a 3-0 victory and a sweep.

The media-heavy Twin Cities promotional backing may have helped the Gophers gain the No 1 ranking in the nation despite losing four players to early NHL contracts. But Snuggerud makes it appear they won’t be missed as the Gophers try to repeat as Big Ten champions.

Early adversity for St. Cloud State 
The St. Cloud State Huskies, who rose up from a disappointing season to make a run at the NCAA tournament last spring, lost some big scorers. But coach Brett Larson has proven to be a master at fashioning his talent into contenders as the season progresses. The Huskies were the first victim of St. Thomas, losing 5-4 in overtime, and had to go to the Mendota Heights home of the Tommies to battle for a 1-0 victory and a split.

But next came a huge rivalry series against MSU Mankato, which spotted the Huskies the first two goals before roaring back to tie the game 2-2 in the second period and beat St. Cloud 3-2 on Adam Eisele’s overtime goal. The next night, Mankato stung the Huskies 5-1 for a sweep.

New coach leads Minnesota State Mankato
Minnesota State Mankato suffered what seemed like crushing setbacks when Mike Hastings left to become head coach at Wisconsin, and several of his top Mavericks entered the transfer portal to go with him. New head coach Luke Strand, however, has regenerated the Mavericks right from the start.

They were heartened by the return to form of Sam Morton, a fifth-year captain who went out after only 10 games with a knee injury last season. Alex Tracy looks solid in goal. The Mavericks have retained a great tradition, as they blocked 23 shots in the 5-1 game against St. Cloud State.

Beavers host Ice Breaker Tournament
Bemidji State is another team joining Northern Michigan and Michigan Tech in trying to unseat MSU Mankato as CCHA champion, and the Beavers got an early taste of the competition by co-hosting the Ice Breaker Tournament with North Dakota to open the season. That came after losing 5-2 at Minnesota in an exhibition opener. Back home, Bemidji State dropped a 4-3 overtime game to Wisconsin and the reappearance of old rival Hastings on the visiting bench.

The next night, Army came to Bemidji’s sparkling Sanford Center and the Beavers made a determined rally to tie the Cadets 2-2 on Eric Pohlkamp’s goal at 7:30 of the third period. Lleyton Roed scored the game-winner at 0:59 of overtime for a 3-2 triumph. Roed also had a goal against Wisconsin, when the Badgers outshot Bemidji 61-19 and only the 57 saves by goaltender Mattias Scholl kept the Beavers in the game.

Toms roll in game one
The state’s newest DI team, the St. Thomas Tommies, served notice of their intentions not only against in-state rivals like Minnesota and St. Cloud State, but challenging the CCHA as a legitimate contender. Blasi established his skills in building Miami of Ohio into a solid team in the NCHC. After he was let go by Miami he was a natural choice to lead the Tommies into DI. So, his team’s early successes this year shouldn’t be a surprise.

Benefitting by the transfer portal, Blasi has assembled speed and talent that went on display in the season-opener at St. Cloud State. Goals by Jake Braccini, Cameron Recchi, Luke Manning and Matthew Gleason got the Tommies into overtime, where former Duluth East star Ryder Donovan scored at 1:11 to win it 5-4. It won’t be easy for St. Thomas to keep knocking off powerful rivals, but Blasi has made a name for himself by sending tough, tenacious teams over the boards.

Now that St. Thomas is planning a new arena for its future, about all they need is to find an ice cream shop — or maybe a St. Paul pizza joint — and come up with a promotion whenever they score five goals.

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