For the second time in the past decade, the Minnesota women’s hockey team will play on amidst the Four Nations Cup.
Why that is not the case every year boggles the mind. The nation’s runaway standard-bearer may not hurt itself through its common, strategic early-November bye week. But the Gophers are the type of team that can maximize depth during the inevitable autumn absence of one or more VIPs.
As it happens, senior defender Lee Stecklein is alone in that regard this season. She joins Wisconsin forward Annie Pankowski and Boston College rearguard Megan Keller as the only current collegians on Team USA for this week’s North America-Scandinavia tourney in Finland.
In so doing, she has already missed the second half of last weekend’s sweep of St. Cloud State. The rest of a four-game homestand will witness a taxi filling Minnesota’s sixth blue-line slot for a set with Minnesota State.
Likewise, the top-ranked Badgers and fourth-ranked Eagles — both NCAA tournament mainstays and Minnesota’s two victims in the last Frozen Four — are raring to handle, if not enjoy, the privilege of can’t-hurt individual growing pains and team-wide experimentation and discovery.
Sure, Keller’s two-way proficiency could be conspicuous by its absence in this coming weekend’s home-and-home series with Boston University. Despite their competitive recession, the Terriers are always inclined to exploit any seams from their natural rivals at any time.
Realistically, though, even a pointless showing in the next two games will not dock the Eagles’ 2016-17 standing beyond repair. Their position within the Hockey East canopy is stronger than one weekend. So, too, is their status as an at-large shoo-in to the national bracket, provided they omit nothing from their collective efforts.
Sans Pankowski, the Badgers turn to a more readily apparent threat after an obligatory sweep of the middling Mavericks, whom they froze while playing down two forwards. The perennially pesky Bemidji State Beavers entered this week with an honorable mention in each major national poll.
Senior stopper Brittni Mowat is undoubtedly craving a program breakthrough to cap off an ornate career at Bemidji. Outdueling the equally stellar Ann-Renee Desbiens and pilfering a few points from Madison could go a long way to that effect.
That is where the deep Wisconsin strike force must remember that its only current player with 100-plus career points will not be around to tip the scale. The junior Pankowski has notched 10 more points (107 in all) in 34 fewer appearances than senior Sarah Nurse.
And despite a slow start, production-wise, of zero goals and six helpers through eight games this fall, Pankowski’s perk-up could have come via the BSU test. That is, if it were not for her international obligations.
For the Badgers’ purposes, Pankowski’s absence is the equivalent of Mowat and her praetorian guards solving the world-class producer. This means the veteran core of Nurse, Emily Clark, Sydney McKibbon and a host of green underclass talent is up for an early-season simulation of the postseason crunch.
It is a hard-earned honor for the only program to have remotely matched Minnesota’s prowess since Wisconsin garnered its first NCAA trophy 10 years ago. And historically speaking, this trend is not limited to the bigwigs of the college ranks.
To refresh the decade-lapse motif once more, this author witnessed a school-based program’s perfect Four Nations Cup storm while chronicling the 19-and-under team at Shattuck-St. Mary’s. By 2006-07, twin sisters Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureux had cemented their long-term promise by emerging as key cogs on SSM’s icebreaking back-to-back national championship runs in 2005 and 2006.
Still only juniors that year, the Lamoureuxs got the call to put their studying-and-skating regimen on hold for the IIHF’s prestigious November dance. In their absence, the SSM Sabres carried on by finishing a decisive late-October weekend tournament triumph on their own campus.
During that title game (a 9-0 rout of Hockey Limited), and then a successful road swing the next week, new blood started flowing with authority. The three most outstanding embodiments were sophomores Jess Cohen and Brianna Decker, plus a freshman by the name of Amanda Kessel.
Through the ensuing winter, even as the Lamoureuxs kept clicking with a deceptively casual persona, none of the others deescalated their newfound productivity rates. That proved critical when the time came to set the tone for the Minnkota District tournament. Once the Sabres shook that off, they all but breezed to a three-peat at USA Hockey’s 2007 year-end bonanza.
Whether it is the Hockey East postseason, the WCHA postseason or the NCAA postseason, this year’s Eagles, Badgers and Gophers all likewise have a crown to defend. Two of those teams have core groups still looking to consummate a foundation of excellence. (The Badgers have not won a national championship since 2011, and no New England program has ever prevailed.)
How they each handle the brief leave of their Four Nations Cup ambassadors, and whatever they retain from the first week of November, could blossom into a crucial factor come March.
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