Regional Madness

I feel sorry for everyone out there who isn't watching the NCAA college hockey tournament. Seriously. It has been filled with exciting games and upsets galore. For example:

Denver and Michigan lost to their lower-seeded opponents Miami and Air Force. Vermont beat Yale. Cornell beat Northeastern with 15 seconds remaining. UNH came back from being down 5-3 to tie the game with .3 seconds left and win in OT. Similar to that, Minnesota-Duluth was down 4-2 with a minute left, scored two goals with the goalie pulled and beat Princeton in OT. The team that no one's really heard of, Bemidji State, took out Notre Dame 5-1. The Irish were #2 in the nation I believe. I wasn't all that surprised because Notre Dame has a tendency to fall short after having a stellar season. Overrated? Judge for yourself.

BU was the only number one seed to advance to the regional championship, and they did so pretty nicely. They won 8-3. The hockey world kept pointing to Ohio State's youth (and they are young: 20 underclassmen or something like that), but BU has quite a crop of young players too. In fact, some of the Terrier freshmen and sophomores are their best players: Colin Wilson, Vinny Saponari, Dave Warsofsky, Colby Cohen, Kevin Shattenkirk, Nick Bonino, Kieran Millan, etc. That said, BU did look like the more experienced team. The Buckeyes showed some bright spots though -- especially when BU let up a little bit and got sloppy.

So the bracket now looks like this:

The BU/UNH game could go either way. UNH gave BU their first loss of the season back in the fall, but BU has beaten them the last two times they played each other. The key is whether or not BU will bring their A game. When they get on a roll, they're set. They will win. But they tend to fall back into reactive hockey sometimes and that hurts them.