F. Scott Fitzgerald, the brain parent of polar personalities Nick Carraway and Tom Buchanan, stands in bronze memoriam in the same vicinity as college hockey coaching legend Herb Brooks. The proximity of the tributes to those two Minnesotans in their native city of St. Paul is most fitting when the NCAA postseason comes and goes.
Little by little, from late February to early April, another class of student-athletes meets a bittersweet transition. The pucksters with no intercollegiate eligibility beyond the current academic year and no realistic professional playing prospects are only enjoying the tutelage of one of Brooks’ emulators for so much longer.
For the graduates of 2017 with those variables at hand, last Saturday’s Frozen Four final has nudged them palpably closer to what Fitzgerald described, through Carraway, in observing the former Yale gridiron staple, Buchanan.
“…I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”
Irrecoverable will be fine overall for the Denver Pioneers, victors in the last college hockey game of 2016-17. But barely 100 hours after claiming their trophy at the United Center, none of the eight rostered seniors had inked a professional pact.
Some of them will have little trouble seguing into the paying ranks in due time. Two-way connoisseur Will Butcher is in Colorado’s prospect pipeline. Backup goaltender Evan Cowley is in Florida’s system.
Conversely, third-string stopper Greg Ogard saw action in parts of five games, accumulating all of 31 minutes and four seconds, in his NCAA career.
To his credit, he was always poised to step in when necessary, even as the Pioneers rotated one of the nation’s most enviable tandems in Tanner Jaillet and Cowley. On the eve of regionals, Pioneers coach Jim Montgomery told the Denver Post’s Mike Chambers, “His attitude and selflessness is incredible.” In the same report, Butcher offered, “He makes the culture of the team strong.”
But Ogard, who finished his undergraduate credits early, will likely feel an inevitable lifestyle upheaval sink in when the championship afterglow tapers off. Barring a miraculously equivalent or bigger offering from a pro team, the 25-year-old will discontinue a daily commitment he adhered to for nearly two decades.
The national champion’s third-string masked man is one anecdotal face on this fact of life. Persistence from the clichéd-but-all-too-real, ungodly-hour youth practices to the Junior A/Tier I/Tier II gap years made the likes of Ogard one of those fortunate not to be filtered out sooner.
Denver senior goaltenders Evan Cowley (center) and Greg Ogard (right), who both pushed champion goaltender Tanner Jaillet through healthy internal competition, chat while preparing for practice, a routine activity that neither may have much more, if any, future opportunities to replicate. (Photo by John Leyba/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
But his four-year extension in the competitive game through a Division I roster spot is, by all accounts, the extent of the extension.
Now that it is over, many of these now-ex-formal athletes are virtually barred from the perks of continuity their paramount peers are about to access.
Any future excursions to the ice will be less frequent, less rigorous and less rewarding. Rational excuses to habitually carbo-load will be hard to come by. Hitting the gym will be a mere matter of maintaining a healthy frame, more for oneself and less for perpetual preparedness when the team needs one’s elite physical condition.
And even in fields that do require such a regimen or figure, the potential rush of glamour and camaraderie will not likely match what one felt in the campus rink.
That is just how the puck spins. It can only do so for so many for so long. For the moment, the post-collegiate selectivity is even stingier in the women’s game, to a degree clamoring for improvement.
Even the men’s ranks used to have more copious offerings for college products to prolong their dreams. When most North American-born seniors were starting their education and first acting on their athletic aspirations, the continent had a semipro team tally in the triple digits.
When Ogard was between the ages of six and eight, seven minor leagues combined for 112 teams in 1998-99, 111 in 1999-00 and 106 in 2000-01. This season, there were 74 minor pro teams in operation on this side of the salty ponds.
That means a higher volume of today’s graduating players will be, in Carraway/Fitzgerald’s words, “one of those men who reached such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.”
A higher volume and percentage will accept that status, or something like it, today than the predecessors they were inspired by as spirited youths. The limited excellence, or at least the limited glorified excellence, is more limited than they may have felt was promised near the turn of the century.
Where to draw the most sensible line on the quality and quantity of professional players is a separate matter. People can debate as much as they please as to who is deserving of how much more serious hockey action after snagging their degree.
Regardless of the reality, there will still be a distinguished class within every class that gets the chance to stick in the pucks-for-pay industry. The best that the rest can do is savor the flavor of their allotment, then find better alternatives to keep channeling their competitive impulse than Buchanan did in Fitzgerald’s magnum opus.
And Fitzgerald’s neighboring Brooks sculpture can still thrust his arms in approval over that.
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