Six Minnesota Gophers seniors are one week removed from becoming the only class to have played in every North Star College Cup. They entered the previous weekend knowing they would hold sole possession of that distinction going forward.
Meanwhile, four time-honored Boston-area programs are trying not to look past their one-off weekend engagements ahead of Monday’s 65th iteration of the men’s Beanpot.
How did the often rightly dubbed “State of Hockey” fail in its effort to emulate the “Hub of Hockey’s” collegiate classic? How does the TD Garden grow unwavering success where the Xcel Energy Center could not sustain a spark?
The answer is that the North Star tournament did not fail, per se. It simply lacked the means to produce a precise replica of the Beanpot.
The Gophers and Minnesota-Duluth Bulldogs are the only two programs in their state who predate the Beanpot. Their rivalry resembles the Boston College-Boston University feud in its reliably competitive history. No other pairing of programs eligible for the North Star College Cup comes close in that regard.
Perhaps if someone had initiated this concept in the 12-year period between St. Cloud State and Bemidji State’s upgrade to Division I, this would be a different narrative. Given Herb Brooks’ connections to the Gophers and Huskies, maybe a four-way bid for the Brooks Cup could have caught on in the ’90s.
Then again, BSU’s 1999 introduction could have thrown in one of the same complications tournament officials conceded to this year. No school has ever joined BC, BU, Harvard and Northeastern to create a Division I hockey quintet in Greater Boston.
Per College Hockey News, a joint statement by the NSCC’s powers that be read, “Our institutions had hoped the tournament would appeal more to fans, however the interest level has not grown over the last four years as we had hoped. In addition, teams have expressed interest in rewarding their fans with games at their home venues.”
The Beanpot bears neither of those drawbacks. Its participants are able to append the first two Mondays of each February to the traditional regular-season maximum of 34 games. This year’s BC Eagles will have held 36 intercollegiate engagements before the playoffs commence.
Granted, only 14 of those contests are at Conte Forum. But the two at the Garden, along with three visits to neighboring campuses, are a quick MBTA ride or two away.
That luxury is common among all four Boston-area programs, as is reliable inclusion in the February festival. Despite nearly a quarter-century of two-team on-ice dominance by BC and BU, especially the latter, the Beanpot can bank on its built-in tradition. It is always the same four schools from within the same area code with the same basic opportunity every year.
Part of the North Star Cup’s problem was the marketing dominance of a single program. Another part was the fact that there are five programs scattered across the state.
This meant that there was always someone sitting out of each installment. The excluded party was never the team with considerably greater name recognition and proximity to the host venue.
Following last weekend’s living wake for the tournament, the Duluth News Tribune’s Matt Wellens wrote, “As St. Cloud State head coach Bob Motzko pointed out last week in discussing the future of the North Star with me, it’s tough to get excited about a tournament that you play in one year, then miss the next.”
Wellens went on to state the obvious: “This was Minnesota’s tournament.”
Technically, it was one of Minnesota’s two tournaments. The Gophers also have the Mariucci Classic in the namesake campus arena after every holiday respite.
In each of their four years of conducting the North Star College Cup, the Gophers were coming off their other in-season tournament by three or four weeks. The proximity on both a geographic and calendar level likely instilled a sense of overkill among local rooters.
The shorter-lived NSCC’s demise proves that both tournaments cannot coexist any more than the NHL and WHA could. Elements of both need to merge if the Twin Cities are going to have so much as a fraternal twin to the Beanpot.
One of Wellens’ suggestions could spawn a solution. If the St. Paul sports mansion is to host a successful midwinter college convention, he writes, “It needs the Minnesota Wild to buy in by being more flexible with its dates — try giving the tournament Thanksgiving weekend or a few days between Christmas and New Year’s, when people have some time off to attend a 4 p.m. semifinal.”
Incidentally, this season’s Mariucci Classic did occur between Christmas and New Year’s, spanning Dec. 30 and 31. And if anything, an in-season college hockey tournament at the Xcel Energy Center should Xerox a few playbook pages from the coinciding Detroit-based Great Lakes Invitational.
From 1979 to 2011, the GLI field normally consisted of Michigan, Michigan State, Michigan Tech and a select out-of-state ringer. BC was the last guest of that kind before the event started rotating one of the Great Lakes State’s four other programs each year. One would be naïve not to suspect that was the long-term goal of at least some tournament organizers.
Perhaps a day will come when a Minnesota-based tournament between Christmas and New Year’s can phase in the same format. A nucleus of the time-honored Gopher-Bulldog feud would help to sustain sufficient Minnesota flavor at the start. But just as the GLI started as an MTU enterprise, incorporating the Wolverines full-time in 1974 and the Spartans in 1979, this hypothetical arrangement should take the home cooking in stride.
Try moving the Mariucci Classic to St. Paul, then phase in the Bulldogs and Huskies as two other mainstays and introduce a new prize in the aforementioned Brooks’ name. That way, John Mariucci and Brooks both have their legacies attached to the tournament, even while it is played away from the Gophers’ and SCSU’s respective arenas named after them.
Over the ensuing decades, who knows? The Mavericks and Beavers may one day have more in-state company to help them feel less left out in their off-years.
Never say “never” to an all-Minnesota answer to the Beanpot. Just file it under “not exact” and “someday.”
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