If you build it, they will come.
There was already considerable buzz about the addition of hockey to the Penn State athletic department six years ago when Pegula Ice Arena opened on campus there. In a community roughly equidistant between hockey-crazy NHL markets like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Buffalo, and with expectations as high as they have ever been for the Nittany Lions on the ice, it’s a fun time to be a fan in the place they’ve dubbed “Hockey Valley.”
“The buzz around hockey at Penn State has been constant ever since this arena was built,” said Lions men’s head coach Guy Gadowsky on Thursday, Oct. 3 as the Big Ten held its annual hockey media conference call. “The students absolutely love it. The season tickets and the student tickets fly off the shelves. So the buzz has been fantastic and it continues to this day.”
And that buzz existed before the Lions were picked by the coaches to win the Big Ten conference title on Monday, Sept. 30.
The Nittany Lions return their top five scorers from a team that led NCAA Division I in goals-per-game (4.54) last season and finished one spot shy of a trip to the 16-team NCAA tournament. After the Lions, most consider the next six spots in the Big Ten standings to be up for grabs.
Unlike the past two seasons, where Notre Dame and then Ohio State took early leads in the standings and never looked back, the thought is that there will be competition for the top spot into February and even March.
“It’s going to be tight. The key is to get off to that good start, because every weekend people are going to be knocking each other off,” Michigan coach Mel Pearson said. “If you can have some consistency and string some wins together you have a chance to get some separation. And that’s the hard part. It’s a good league.”
And even Pearson admits that the Lions are the team to beat.
“I think it’s going to be more competitive. Having said that, Penn State with what they return on paper, they’ve got some really talented players who have done it,” Pearson said. “But I really like the talent level spread across the Big Ten. I know Minnesota lost a lot but when you look at the talent base they have and the young guys coming in, they’ve got an exciting group.”
Gophers coach Bob Motzko reiterated that his team will be young in many key areas, with a dozen new players on the roster, and has been subtly managing fan expectations, stressing the idea that with so much youth in key areas, it might take his team a month or two to get rolling. He also feels the mere concept of preseason predictions should be taken lightly.
“I’ve been around a long time and I’ve always said that picking preseason standings to the end of the year has been silly,” Motzko said. “But I know it’s part of the pageantry of college athletics. It’s a football thing and hockey joined in it. Fans love to banter it around.”
Pearson, whose team’s season ended with a pair of losses to the Gophers in the conference playoffs in March, has seen first-hand the folly of preseason prognostications in his two seasons running the Wolverines program.
“We were picked to finish second last year, and we finished tied for fifth,” he said. “My first year, we were picked to finish sixth and we finished second. So you never know until start playing. I guess that’s where the cautious optimism comes in.”
There’s plenty of optimism among Penn State fans, which is a far cry from their first two seasons in the conference, when the Lions were the consensus pick for the cellar. The coaches are trying to focus on the ice and not on the predictions.
“We haven’t really talked about it,” Gadowsky said. “For a long time we were picked in the basement and when we were picked to finish last, we didn’t talk about that either, so I don’t know if it’s fair to pretend it’s important to us.”
The Big Ten season opens Nov. 1, with Penn State hosting Wisconsin, Ohio State hosting Michigan and the Gophers hosting Notre Dame.
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