Each week, USCHO.com will pick the top 10 moments from the past weekend in our Monday 10 feature.
1) Golden moment for college hockey
USA’s 2-1 overtime victory over Canada in Sunday’s Olympic gold medal game offered one of the greatest capstone moments for the NCAA and its ability to cross borders. Most publicly, the medal represented the first gold for the USA since 1980’s “Miracle on Ice” team stunned the Soviet Union ahead of its clinching victory over Finland, which itself was the second championship after the 1960 team won its “Forgotten Miracle” title by placing ahead of the Canadians in Squaw Valley, Calif.
Nearly 70 years since that first gold medal and 46 years since the made-for-Hollywood story in Lake Placid, America is a very different hockey landscape with a talent pool stretching both coasts and across multiple climates, but what didn’t change was the impact of a college hockey landscape that produced nearly every skater on the record-setting, best-on-best group of American professionals. But where 20 of the 25 Team USA players played college hockey before matriculating into the professional ranks, an additional 29 players stepped on the Milano-Cortina ice surface with roots in 28 different programs.
Six played for Boston University, and an additional four played for Michigan while Clarkson, Minnesota, Minnesota State and Robert Morris produced three players apiece. Three Hobey Baker Award winners skated in Italy, and all except for Team Sweden featured at least one player with Slovakia dressing active Minnesota-Duluth goaltender Adam Gajan.
On pure statistics, no Olympics has ever felt more collegiate. Cale Makar’s UMass program didn’t exist in its current form when the 1980 Miracle on Ice team won its gold medal, and both he and Devon Toews skated against an American side that featured former players from Omaha (Jake Guentzel), UMass-Lowell (Connor Hellebuyck), Maine (Jeremy Swayman), and Connecticut (Tage Thompson) — all programs that grew into their current form after 1980.
Considering AIC alum Janis Jaks as part of Latvia and Division III Plattsburg’s Nicholas Jensen as part of Denmark, it’s clear that the college game is growing into an unbeatable part of the international hockey landscape.
2) Doing the double
Speaking of growth, it’s impossible to mention the women’s hockey tournament without college hockey’s impact. Simply put, the United States-Canada matchup wouldn’t exist, at least not in its current form, without its 46 players with college ties. Both teams in Italy were built through NCAA players, and nearly two dozen of those played for either Wisconsin or Ohio State.
Nineteen players on both teams won at least one NCAA national team championship, and seven Patty Kazmaier Award winners played for either the Badgers, the Buckeyes or Boston College while Americans Kendall Coyne Schofield and Aerin Frankel both played for Northeastern while Taylor Heise played for Minnesota.
In addition, seven Americans are part of current collegiate rosters with Tessa Janecke leading Penn State, a program that’s barely 10 years old.
The two players most prominently involved in the gold medal-winning goal also played against one another in the 2017 Women’s Frozen Four when Keller’s Boston College team lost to Ann-Renne Desbiens’ Wisconsin team, 1-0, in St. Charles, Mo. Safe to say that Keller got her revenge, but it’s also a safe assumption to think that women’s college hockey is capable of feeding this rivalry for years to come.
3) NCHC Showdown Set For Kalamazoo
North Dakota entered the weekend with an outside shot of clinching the NCHC regular season championship, but a tie and shootout loss to St. Cloud State on Friday night coupled with Western Michigan’s five-point weekend at Colorado College prevented the Fighting Hawks from celebrating any type of Penrose Cup silverware. That said, UND remains on an inside track that gives its squad a two-thirds chance of clinching the top seed on Friday in the front end of a series taking place in Kalamazoo.
Helping the cause was an outright 6-4 victory on Saturday that featured six different goal scorers in a win over the Huskies. Even with a 1-0 deficit in the early first period, UND rallied with two goals over a 30-second span to post a 2-1 lead that became 3-1 before the halfway point of the first period. That said, the lead twice failed to hold off rallies after St. Cloud scored twice to tie UND at 3-3 before later knotting the game at 4-4. Goals by Jack Kernan and Ellis Rickwood — the latter being on an empty net — ensured three points remained at Engelstad Arena.
Western Michigan, meanwhile, took a 2-0 victory on Saturday night to remain both five points behind the Fighting Hawks and in a tie for second place with Denver. Mathematically speaking, the Pioneers cannot win the head-to-head matchup for the No. 1 spot because of its dueling losses to Western, but the Broncos can still outright clinch the Penrose Cup with a regulation sweep. In a 5-point situation, both UND and Western would finish tied, but Western would hold the No. 1 seed.
4) Speaking of Denver…
Denver avoided a potential percentage index banana peel by sweeping a pair of games at Omaha over the Valentine’s Day holiday weekend, but the Pioneers spent this past weekend in an idle state as rankings and statistics swirled around the nation.
Now entrenched as the No. 9 team in the national statistics poll, the Pioneers head into the NCHC postseason with a decisive advantage over a Minnesota-Duluth team currently seeded one spot behind them for the playoffs. Neither team can meet one another in the quarterfinal round, and it would take a second-place outright finish and a loss by top-seeded North Dakota to force a semifinal matchup between two clubs vying for potential national positioning. Knowing, then, that Denver potentially holds enough cards to pass the Bulldogs puts interesting permutations into play for the Sioux Falls and Loveland regions if Quinnipiac is unable to vanquish teams in the ECAC postseason.
5) Cleary Cup within reach…again
As for the Bobcats, a split against Cornell and Colgate resulted in the first home loss of the season at M&T Bank Arena on Friday night, but a 5-2 win over the Raiders on Saturday ensured that the Cleary Cup conversation would factor into this weekend’s finale against Dartmouth and Harvard. Having never trailed on Saturday as part of a 2-0 and 4-1 advantage through the first two periods, Quinnipiac benefitted from Union’s two-goal rally to force overtime in a 3-3 tie and shootout loss against Dartmouth.
Having previously defeated RPI on Friday night, the Big Green still pulled within four points of Quinnipiac, but an outright win would’ve forced a head-to-head finish on Friday night. Now, there’s still a chance that the Bobcats could win the Cleary Cup with a loss to Dartmouth as long as they don’t lose more points to Harvard than the Big Green gain against Princeton on Saturday. In any event, Dartmouth still needs to outright win in regulation before advancing to the game on Saturday against the Tigers.
6) Gavin McKenna might’ve helped Penn State score a goal while I typed this
Gavin McKenna continued his tour de force for a second straight weekend when he recorded a Big Ten-record seven assists as part of Penn State’s 11-4 statement win over Ohio State.
The Nittany Lions scored nine goals across the second and third period with three players scoring two apiece, but McKenna’s seven assists started a weekend run that ended with an overtime winner in a 5-4 victory on Saturday night.
Those wins helped push the program north of 250 wins since Guy Gadowsky assumed command of the elevated club program and further clinched a third place finish in a Big Ten that’s increasingly gaining hold on top seeds in the national tournament.
7) All roads lead to Waltham
Bentley’s run as Atlantic Hockey America’s breakthrough program continued its ascent through the regular season when the Falcons clinched their first-ever regular season championship with a 4-3 win over RIT on Friday night. The No. 1 seed in the league, they hold an 11-point advantage over the Tigers and Sacred Heart Pioneers with two games remaining in the regular season.
All four Bentley goals came in the second period after Stephen Castagna, Chase Davis, Arlo Merritt and Jake Black scored, and Lukas Swedin made 29 saves as the defense held RIT’s third period charge at bay for the one-goal victory.
With the win, Bentley is assured home ice advantage through the entire AHA postseason, which consists of best-of-three quarterfinal and best-of-three semifinal rounds before a single game championship.
8) Providence Nears First Regular Season Banner
Providence began the 2026 portion of its schedule by splitting a series against Alaska. Splits against Merrimack and UMass dotted the first half of the Hockey East season, and a split at Colorado College led into a tighter-than-expected, 4-2 Mayor’s Cup win over Brown. Series against Maine and Boston College loomed, but the Friars weren’t expected to take the lead position of an ultra-competitive Hockey East race.
Fast forward two full months, and PC enters this weekend’s series against New Hampshire with the regular season hardware nearly in its collective grip. A loss to Northeastern is the lone blemish on an otherwise-perfect stretch, and this past weekend’s sweep at Vermont illustrated the dominance associated with a team befitting its pole position slot.
Even with a 1-0 deficit in Friday’s game at Gutterson Fieldhouse, the Friars pummeled Vermont to post a 4-1 lead through a 15-minute stretch of hockey across the first and second periods before opening scoring with three goals over 10 minutes in the first period of Saturday’s game.
Leading Boston College by nine points with two weekends left, PC can clinch the regular season championship with one point if Boston College and Connecticut post simultaneous losing efforts against Boston University and UMass. Previously, the Friars shared a regular season crown with BC in 2016 but have never won one outright.
9) Bubblicious
Whatever happens in Hockey East won’t easily pass through Chestnut Hill and the City of Boston after BC swept UConn by five points over the weekend. Winning 5-2 at home and 2-1 in overtime on the road, the Eagles solidified their postseason resume as the No. 12 team in the NPI while the Huskies fell into a more-dreaded position around the CCHA’s bubbling mathematical mess.
Perhaps in a sign of things to come, St. Thomas lost five-of-six points to Augustana after the Vikings from a two-goal deficit to score a tying goal in the final minute of the third period. A subsequent 2-0 loss in the shootout took a second point away from the Tommies before a 4-0 loss on Saturday ended Augie’s regular season with its 20th overall win.
St. Thomas, meanwhile, dropped to No. 15 in the NPI and lost its ownership of the No. 1 seed. That said, the Tommies retained the inside track to the No. 1 spot because of a second place tie with Michigan Tech, but the math gets very touch-and-go if neither team is able to outright win the conference. Perhaps worst of all, St. Thomas stands atop a four-team CCHA logjam around the final spot in the NCAA Tournament, to which the league conceivably doesn’t hold an at-large bid if its champion falls below the cut line.
10) One for the road
The start of the women’s hockey postseason brought the inevitable curtain down on several teams failing to advance, and perhaps the most emotional loss came when Robert Morris defeated Delaware to move into this weekend’s quarterfinal round. Playing a single game elimination game to advance to play Lindenwood, a goal by Jessica MacKinnon earned a second playoff game before a 3-1 loss to the Lions ended their season.
Union, meanwhile, earned its second-ever victory against Clarkson when the Garnet Chargers won at Cheel Arena for the first time in program history, 2-1.