Men’s D-I: CCHA (Defunct)

Congratulations, Notre Dame … And Now You’ve Done It Sure, the Fighting Irish have won their second regular-season title in three years, but does anyone else see the real evil lurking for Notre Dame because of this? In 2007, the fourth-place Michigan State Spartans beat Boston College for a national championship. In 2008, the Fighting … Read more

The Honeymoon Is Over Last week’s column was my nine-page valentine to you, dear reader. This week is different. When my Mott Community College students complained about the single class in which they received chocolate this week, I told them, “I only love you enough to buy you half-priced, post-Valentine’s Day candy once, not twice.” … Read more

Accentuating the Positive Not exactly how you’d expect the annual Valentine’s Day column to begin, is it? After all, this holiday is a middle-aged, bitter, divorced, hockey-loving girl reporter’s dream. Underperforming flagship programs portending gate issues at Joe Louis Arena next month, key injuries to players for the league’s top team, a general sense of … Read more

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Program First off, I want to thank all of you for your responses to last week’s column. I received a lot of feedback — in person at Yost Ice Arena last Saturday, from colleagues on the campus at Mott Community College this week, by email — much of … Read more

Rashomon Hockey In director Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece Rashomon, the story of a violent crime unfolds in flashback from the perspective of four different characters. A notorious bandit overcomes a husband and wife, killing him and raping her, but at the bandit’s trial, four different versions of the story emerge from four different witnesses — … Read more

Seemed Like Old Times Bryan Hogan, a victim of Mercury retrograde. In Ann Arbor last Friday, Hogan felt a little bit of the love that senior goaltender Billy Sauer was feeling for the first half of the season when he provided solid goaltending for the Wolverines with absolutely no support from the offense. Hogan, a … Read more

Even I Get It Right Sometimes As I return to teaching at Mott Community College this week, I’m faced with how wrong I am about everything, and how often. Don’t I know that no one gives homework in the first week of class? Why should I expect anyone to come to a writing class with … Read more

Back to School As the second half of the regular season begins, there is one undeniable truth: the top four teams in the CCHA are from states other than Michigan — some very far away from Michigan. With all due respect to the teams in my new home state, this continued non-Michigan dominance of the … Read more

Was It a Dream, or Not? The other night, I drifted off while watching my favorite cinematic adaptation of the Charles Dickens’ novel A Christmas Carol, the 1951 version entitled Scrooge, adapted by Noel Langley, directed by Brian Desmond Hurst and starring Alatair Sim in the most definitive performance ever of the title role. Although … Read more

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas…Circa 1981 There are six inches of snow on the ground in Flint, Mich., and the weather reports call for uninterrupted cold for the foreseeable future. When the snows first fell two weeks ago in my new hometown, I grumbled as though I’d moved north from the deep … Read more

The Sky Is Falling! I suppose I should be writing some sort of feel-good Thanksgiving column about what each team should be thankful for, as I have attempted with little success in years past. I’m sure that there are plenty of CCHA-related things for which to be grateful, but I’ve seen so much mediocre hockey … Read more