Frozen Four set: Denver vs. Wisconsin
The NCAA men’s hockey title will be Denver versus Wisconsin on Saturday, with the championship scheduled for 5:30 p.m. ET — a single game that decides the national crown (espn.com). Denver reached the final in dramatic fashion, beating Michigan 4–3 in double overtime on a winner from defenseman Kent Anderson and moving within one game of an 11th program title (sports.yahoo.com) (denverpost.com).
Denver needed 87 minutes and 25 seconds to get there, and now the national championship comes down to one game between the Pioneers and Wisconsin on Saturday, April 11, at 5:30 p.m. Eastern on ESPN in Las Vegas. (ncaa.com) The semifinal that sent Denver through was the kind of game that scrambles a season into one night: Michigan led 3-2 with 8:58 left in the third period, Clarke Caswell tied it with 2:46 remaining, and defenseman Kent Anderson won it 4-3 at 7:25 of the second overtime. (sports.yahoo.com) Denver also survived because goaltender Johnny Hicks stopped 49 shots, which is the sort of number that usually belongs to a losing box score, not a team still skating toward a title. (sports.yahoo.com) Wisconsin reached the final from the other semifinal by beating North Dakota 2-1, so the title game is not a rematch of the teams many people circled when the bracket came out. It is a Big Ten Conference power against a National Collegiate Hockey Conference power, with Wisconsin carrying six national titles and Denver chasing an 11th. (espn.com) That 11-title number is the piece hanging over Denver. The Pioneers are already one of the sport’s blue-blood programs, and another championship would push them farther up the all-time list while giving them a third national crown in five years. (sports.yahoo.com) Wisconsin’s angle is different. The Badgers are one of college hockey’s old powers, but this run puts them back on the last weekend of the season with a chance to add a seventh banner and remind everyone that the Big Ten has not owned this event the way Denver’s league has in recent years. (espn.com) The setting adds another wrinkle because the Frozen Four is in Las Vegas at T-Mobile Arena, far from the upper Midwest campuses where both programs built their identities. College hockey usually lives in cold-weather rinks and bus-trip geography; this weekend it ends under the Strip lights. (ncaa.com) So the final picture is simple even after a messy tournament: Wisconsin got there by winning a one-goal semifinal, Denver got there by outlasting Michigan in double overtime, and Saturday night decides whether the Badgers collect No. 7 or the Pioneers move to No. 11. (ncaa.com)
