February is usually a month wrought with hand-wringing within the college hockey community.
Teams and programs need points more than ever to advance their postseason dreams into optimal positions while teams hanging around the national Pairwise Rankings bubble can’t let their own clutch results slip through fingertips. One or two missed opportunities is the difference between ended national championship dreams and a trip to the 16-team bracket in March, and scoreboard-watching is tempting regardless of how many people deny their nightly glances.
In New York’s Capital District, Union coach Josh Hauge, like 11 other ECAC teams not named Quinnipiac, understands both the challenge and luxury of not having to worry about that Pairwise battle. His Garnet Chargers hold the 16th-best winning percentage in the country and a 15-9-2 overall record, but playing the schedule at hand meant Union entered February as the No. 40 team in the overall Pairwise Rankings – nowhere near a national tournament berth.
Yet few teams hold the dark horse card better than the team playing its final season at Messa Rink. Two regulation losses since Jan. 1 have the Garnet Chargers surging through the ECAC standings, and a five-point weekend against Yale and Brown capped a week in which the Mayor’s Cup trophy returned to Schenectady with a 3-2 overtime win over Rensselaer. Hardly an overlooked team in league circles, Hauge has a team believing in what’s possible, and what’s possible is a potential and hopeful run to the Herb Brooks Arena after the calendar switches to March.
“We’re still trying to figure out how good we can be,” said the coach over the weekend performance. “I think there are times where we’re playing great hockey, but for us, it’s still a battle of doing it shift-in and shift-out while having the mindset of taking that next step.”
Winning five points from Southern New England’s Ivy League travel partners required a little bit of both. Friday night’s game required two comebacks after William Dineen and Micah Berger staked the Elis to a 2-0 lead in the first 13 minutes, but both Drew Sutton and Nate Hanley scored to knot the game before the first period ended. Falling behind again in the second period on Ronan O’Donnell’s goal, Cullen Ferguson scored in the first four minutes of the third period to send the game into overtime, where Hanley and Brandon Buhr overcame Berger’s first round shootout goal to take the second point.
One night later, Union changed its tune by opening the scoring with a pair of goals, but Zackary Tonelli brought Brown within a goal after Caden Villegas and Buhr tallied their strikes in the first two periods. A goaltending duel between Kyle Chauvette and Tyler Shea ended with the Garnet Chargers registering one extra save than the Bears as part of an old-school game featuring 12 different penalties and eight power plays for a Brown team that failed to convert any extra-attacker goals – though Tonelli’s goal was short-handed, for what it’s worth.
“It was a credit to Yale,” said Hauge, “because they came out really hard. They took the game to us a little bit, and it took a little bit for us to really push back. But I thought it was a good response, since we were down 2-0 and able to battle back. Getting to 2-1 was really important and put us in the spot for later on in the game.
“[The messaging] really came from the locker room. At this time of the season, [leadership] is important because you know every point is important and there are only so many games left at Messa, so we had to make sure we’re competing in every single one of them.”
The results were undeniable for a side that opened the 2025 portion of its season in seventh place with a clear ceiling forming over its head. The turn of the year had eliminated some of the parity poking through the middle of ECAC’s league table by returning Quinnipiac and Clarkson to the top three spots in the league, and Colgate’s second-place presence with Dartmouth and Cornell floating around the fourth-place transition spot cocooned a first-round bye away from teams like Princeton, Harvard and Union. The Garnet Chargers had games in hand against everyone, but their preseason eighth-place finish was more prophetic after the first half ended with sweeping losses at Princeton and Quinnipiac and a pair of non-conference losses at Vermont.
The road trips to Brown and Yale weren’t exactly kind spots to start the second half of the year, either. Union hadn’t won a regulation game in Providence since before COVID-19 and hadn’t won in New Haven since the first round of the ill-fated 2020 conference tournament. A combined 6-11-3 over the last 20 meetings against both teams included a 2-7-1 mark against Yale, and whatever success started on Friday nights in the first half of this season hadn’t yet carried over to Saturday’s 3-5-0 record.
Ripping off a pair of hard-fought wins under those circumstances therefore created a launching pad for the second half of the year, and Union hasn’t been swept over any of its subsequent weekends. A loss at Clarkson and a loss at home against Dartmouth were sticking points, but an 8-5 win at St. Lawrence brought a road split from the North Country before a 4-1 win against Harvard gained space in the hunt for a first-round home game.
Then came the Mayor’s Cup win over the Engineers and the five-point weekend against Brown and Yale.
“These are guys that stayed with the program after there was a coaching change,” said Hauge, “and they really wanted to leave it in a better spot than what they were already a part of from the beginning. They wanted to make sure this team and this program was in a really good spot, and they take a ton of pride in [building Union hockey]. They’ve put us in a good stretch here to be competing for some – and playing in – some meaningful games down the stretch.”
In a year of improbabilities in ECAC, Union now holds a 40 percent chance of gaining a first-round bye. A last home playoff game at Messa is a virtual lock for at least the first round, and a win moves the likelihood of a best-of-three quarterfinal series north of 50 percent. Anything better than a 50-50 finish in the final eight games of the season increases those likelihoods, and there’s still a very good chance at a top-two finish with an outside shot at the Cleary Cup, though the remaining games still include four games against the Cornell-Colgate duo with a home series against Quinnipiac and Princeton and a road trip to Harvard and Dartmouth sandwiched in between.
In other words, Union’s got a great chance, but it’s because all of the remaining games are against the teams it needs to beat or pass.
“We’re strictly focused on our Friday night opponent [right now],” said Hauge, “and we’ll try to get dialed in. As a staff, we’ll transition to Saturday, but we don’t want the guys to worry about anything other than Friday night, and then on the bus to wherever we have to go after that, that’s when we start focusing on Saturday.”
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As a reminder, Union hockey is playing this season in honor of its broadcaster, Matt DuBrey, who was diagnosed with leukemia before the season. He’s continuing that battle, and a GoFundMe continues to support Matt and his family. For more information, visit the link for updates and how to donate to Matt as he continues his fight.
