College hockey community bid many tough goodbyes in 2016

There is no other way to couch this matter. The college hockey community elicited its best attributes under the worst circumstances on many occasions in 2016.

From officials to builders to unsung office personnel, men who covered multiple bases and made the most out of their passion for the sport left us too soon. When they did, the testaments to their respective impacts resounded.

Visually speaking, the most powerful instance came in Colorado, where vigils prayed for and mourned the locally born Butch Mousseau. A trailblazing referee of Native American lineage, Mousseau had seen action in both the NCHC and WCHA, as well as several minor professional leagues.

Mousseau was working the WCHA semifinals when he sustained a head injury upon tripping amidst his warmup lap. He would succumb to the complications a week later, on March 25, at the age of 48 in a Grand Rapids, Mich., hospital.

Six months after his passing, the last league Mousseau represented retired his No. 12 jersey for all on-ice officials. The NCHC did the same, and also named its officiating mentoring program after him. Those gestures, along with nods from member schools, serve to honor the infectious enjoyment he expressed while holding one of the game’s most thankless positions.

Midwestern institutions, in particular, brooked another sudden tragedy with the death of Ron Mason. The feisty former bench boss at Lake Superior State, Bowling Green and Michigan State never lost his puck-talk slap shot, even in the 14 years that followed his final game.

Mason, who had topped the NCAA’s all-time wins leaderboard until December 2012, offered his two cents on all hockey happenings on the Friday, June 10 edition of a Lansing sports talk radio show. Among the topics were the soon-to-conclude Stanley Cup Finals and the passing of professional giant Gordie Howe.

On the other side of that weekend, the same program was coming to grips with the news of Mason’s fatal heart attack at 76. None other than MSU’s Munn Ice Arena subsequently hosted a moving memorial service, featuring a who’s who of East Lansing and at-large college hockey community members alike. They were there to honor a life defined by on-ice dedication, off-ice philanthropy and all-around standard-raising.

While Mason’s glory was most manifest in his winning Spartan teams, he crucially flooded the varsity ponds at both LSSU and BGSU to begin with. More schools of varying sizes and locations now offer enticing opportunities for Division I aspirants because of him.

The same can be said of Bruce Marshall, the first D-I head coach in Connecticut’s hockey chronicles who died at age 54 in mid-October.

In 1988, Marshall inherited a losing Division III program overwhelmingly overshadowed by its basketball brethren. He himself was only three years removed from playing his last game for the same program.

Within 10 years, the UConn pucksters were ready to move up to the MAAC (now Atlantic Hockey) circuit. In addition, Freitas Ice Forum was ready to add a women’s wing at the turn of the century.

Marshall’s tenure in Storrs culminated in 2013, after which he shuffled to another D-III program at Franklin Pierce. In between, the Huskies finished the ascension he had started by joining the more marquee Hockey East conference in 2014.

Another untimely and unexpected loss struck the D-III circles with the death of former St. Norbert assistant coach Rob Nicholson. Unassuming and nationally underpublicized, the 59-year-old Nicholson emboldened the full scope of the Green Bay, Wisc., hockey community through various positions.

Each of these passings — along with that of Northeastern alumnus Dan Lupo at 44 — shook the college hockey community the most through their sheer morally incomprehensible nature. But it is never easy to bid a final farewell to anybody who leaves an appreciable, enduring imprint.

For that reason, we also recall the legacies of three other figures who intersected the U.S. college and international games.

Jack Riley transformed the program at West Point and coached Team USA’s first Olympic gold-medal run in 1960. With that, he cemented the NCAA’s no-turning-back status on its rise to recognition as a legitimate hockey talent factory.

Jack Kirrane, Riley’s Squaw Valley team captain, did not skate in an intercollegiate contest himself. But he went on to serve as the rink manager at Harvard’s Bright-Landry Hockey Center.

Walter Bush was never directly involved in a college hockey entity. However, the longtime USA Hockey executive amplified the sport’s relevance by overseeing the coalescence of college-bred talent on both the 1980 men’s and 1998 women’s Olympic teams that corralled the country’s other two gold medals to date.

The latter achievement, in particular, has been heavily credited to Bush’s lobbying for international women’s tournaments. So too, in turn, should the women’s college game’s upgrade to formal NCAA sponsorship in 2000.

Without Bush, among others, the college hockey community would not be nearly as expansive as it is at 2016’s transition to 2017. But paradoxically, without Bush, Kirrane, Lupo, Mason, Mousseau, Nicholson and Riley, the community would also not feel as small as it does.

Each of these figures made the college game more accessible, magnetic, enjoyable and respectable. No one from their respective (often intersecting) networks shall forget that.