There’s a certain level of required dissatisfaction that exists with national championship contenders in college hockey.
They exist on a plane that other teams aspire to reach, but their ability to annually compete is built around an idea that winning, while expected, is never taken for granted. It sounds basic enough to fulfill a cliche, but the notion is designed to help even the most experienced winner disarm an ego while simultaneously reteaching the requirements of how to start a season at the ground level.
That entire, basic belief is how Rand Pecknold and Quinnipiac have been able to rediscover their groove on an annual basis, and this past weekend, the Bobcats took a giant step forward when they claimed a dominant 6-2 win during a non-conference weekend series at North Dakota.
“For October games, I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in anything that’s had that kind of emotion on both nights from both teams,” Pecknold said. “It was a big-time atmosphere, and I wouldn’t even say it felt like a regional; it felt like the Frozen Four. There was a great build-up by both teams and by both coaching staffs to get their teams ready.”
The win on Saturday answered a number of early season questions that surrounded Quinnipiac and, to a degree, the ECAC Hockey conference at large by stoking the fires around an opponent that was ranked third in the nation. The Fighting Hawks had only played two games against Holy Cross, but the weekend came on the heels of a surprising 2-2 tie against LIU.
The Bobcats additionally had squandered two, three-goal leads in Friday’s game against North Dakota. There was a 3-0 lead in the first period and a 4-1 lead in the second period, but four unanswered goals by four different goal scorers over less than 15 minutes of game clock turned the score on its head before the halfway point of the third period. Needing to rally, senior CJ McGee’s third career goal tied a 5-5 result that eventually saw North Dakota win a shootout for posterity.
“The Friday game was emotionally a roller coaster,” Pecknold said. “They dominated, and we really struggled. We had some players that, for whatever reason, weren’t playing well, and we weren’t managing the puck well. North Dakota just kept coming, and it was crazy. But then Saturday was a huge win for us.”
It didn’t start dominant after North Dakota built a 2-1 lead in the first period, but the way Quinnipiac engaged and imposed its will over the next two periods likely raised some eyebrows among future headlining opponents. The offense scored three goals in four minutes, including two in 19 seconds, to build a 4-2 lead, and Desi Burgart added some flair when his first goal of the season capped an exchange that undressed the North Dakota defense with passing wizardry.
“My disappointment on Friday was our puck management,” Pecknold said. “We’d have a one-on-four and try to toe-drag a kid. That would lead to a turnover, and then we’d spend 25 seconds in the defensive zone. That’s not how we play. We want to defend by having the puck, and we defend by playing offense. That’s our big thing, and that’s my big sell to our players, and we didn’t do a good job of that. North Dakota, on Friday night, was [playing] dump-and-chase the entire game.
“It works, but the reason they had the puck so much was because we just weren’t managing it in the neutral zone.”
The win once again merged Quinnipiac into the national conversation and staked a claim to the No. 1 national ranking after the Bobcats moved into the No. 3 slot in the weekly poll with a road trip to Maine on the horizon. Having now beaten Boston College and North Dakota as a visiting team, the highest-ranked undefeated team vaulted over Denver, which lost to UMass while occupying the top slot, and earned three first place votes behind Minnesota and Minnesota State while simultaneously establishing a foothold for an ECAC Hockey league still fighting its way out of last year’s doldrums.
“Anytime you have two top-10 teams playing, it elevates the [profile],” Pecknold said. “What I’ve noticed over the last little while is that pretty much everybody we play and everywhere we go, home or away, we’ve been a top-10 program, but players get excited to play a top-10 game. When you have both teams that are top-10, it just escalates the emotions and passion. Every play matters [and] we want that passion every game. I think that’s a strength of ours that we typically have in most games. Certainly, last year, we had it a lot. We’d go play a team that we were supposed to beat, and we were excited to play them and respected them. We had to grind out of a lot of wins last year.”
“We talk a lot as a team about attacking adversity. That’s what’s created when you go on the road. Sometimes it’s even going to play a weaker opponent on the road, where the rinks are not great or there aren’t fans. That’s adversity when you don’t have an atmosphere to get you fired up. Anytime you go on the road, you need that adversity early in the season because you’re going to face a lot of it come playoff time. Even among the players, you need to learn how to deal with it, and even your veteran players have to re-learn it because they’ve dealt with it before. It’s just a maturation process, so anything you can get in a situation at BC or North Dakota, it’s an outstanding learning experience.”
No. 3 Quinnipiac plays at Maine this weekend with a 7 p.m. start on Saturday and a 4 p.m. start on Sunday. Following this weekend, ECAC Hockey play opens with a home series against Colgate and Cornell on Nov. 4-5.
