It Was Always Denver

Perhaps you were tricked into believing that Michigan's terrible luck in these national semifinal games meant that they were bound to win one at some point. That was my headspace when I wrote the Frozen Four Preview article with David earlier in the week, before I broke down the Denver tape for the actual game preview and got a lot more concerned. Maybe it was when Michigan went up 2-1 in the first period. After wobbling in the opening ~9.5 minutes and falling behind 1-0, Michigan scored two goals in the span of 59 seconds. Josh Eernisse smoked a missile off a draw that Denver goalie Johnny Hicks had little hope of stopping. Not long after, TJ Hughes tapped a loose puck off a hard bounce via the end-boards into the empty net. For the first time since the 2nd period of the 2018 national semifinal against Notre Dame, Michigan held a lead in a Frozen Four game. That was certainly an early indicator that maybe this time would be different. Of course, that lead didn't last long. The moment when most started to believe was in the third period. Finally being given a power play after a lopsided whistle, Michigan's 1-ranked PP made it count. Jayden Perron walked along the top of the offensive zone and uncorked a laser of a shot that beat the seemingly indestructible Johnny Hicks. Michigan now had a 3rd period lead in a Frozen Four game for the first time since 2011. You know, the last one they won. As the 1 team in the field, with just under nine minutes to play in the game. The finish line was in sight. A date for Wisconsin was there for the taking. [Bill Rapai]That's probably when I believed for the first time all day. And to Michigan's credit, they defended brilliantly for the next five minutes. The Pioneers got almost nothing to speak of until there were three minutes left in the game. The home stretch of the race had arrived and all Michigan had to do was hold on for a little longer. But then, out of nowhere, a chance appeared. Not a great chance. It wasn't a breakaway or a terrible breakdown leaving a shooter all alone to fire it in the net. No, it was a player from Denver's third line at the side of the net with his stick in good position. The puck came from the corner towards the net and a perfect deflection followed. Jack Ivankovic could have made the save but it would've been a fabulous effort. This was high skill hockey, on a sorta-chance that appeared out of thin air. Denver had three shots on goal in the entire third period, compared to nine for Michigan. That was one of them... and it goes in. Unbelievable, if it weren't entirely believable to anyone familiar with Denver in this tournament or Michigan in this round. With 2:46 to play in regulation, the game was tied at 3. [AFTER THE JUMP: keep reading if you want]---[Bill Rapai]I started writing this article after that. Yes, I wrote much of that intro, including the opening paragraphs, during the overtime as the game was still going on. You can call it my coping mechanism. Assume the worst and if Michigan scored to win, I could laugh and delete all this and begin writing the national title game preview. But I knew what was coming. Deep down, all of us knew. There was a brief moment when I thought wait, we might win this after Denver had an A++ deflection look in front that went off the crossbar. That looked like the one that ends it in the milliseconds before we heard it hit iron and when Michigan caught a break there, I started to wonder if cosmic forces had swung back our way. But my overarching assumption was proven correct. It was always Denver. I've been covering college hockey for nine seasons now and in that time, there is always one NCHC team that doesn't have overwhelming NHL talent or any particular reason to win at the rate they do in the NCAA Tournament other than God loves them. First it was Duluth, who won national titles in 2018 and 2019 and then nearly won again in 2021 after winning the longest game in college hockey history. Now there is Denver, who first won in 2017 as a legitimately loaded front-runner under coach Jim Montgomery. Since David Carle has taken over, Denver has won in the NCAA Tournament at a rate that defies any explanation. After beating Wisconsin on Saturday, the Pioneers have claimed three national titles in five years. His team's record in the NCAA Tournament in that span is 14-2. All three of those national titles came when his team wasn't the 1 or 2 overall seed in the field (this year it was as a 2-seed) and his 2025 Frozen Four appearance came as a 3-seed. The expected performance of his team in the NCAA Tournament based on their seedings is probably 2-3 Frozen Four appearances in that span and maybe one national title. Four Frozen Fours and three national titles is nonsensical. [Bill Rapai]Especially when you consider how they happened. In 2024, his team won the title because goalie Matt Davis, an undrafted netminder who was good but never won individual awards in his college career, stopped 138 of 141 shots over four games (.979), including making an all-timer save in the title game. This year, undrafted goalie Johnny Hicks stitched together the greatest hot streak the NCAA has ever seen a goalie have, being capped off by stopping 128 of 134 (.955) shots in the four NCAA Tournament games. Denver is a great program with very good players and an elite head coach, for sure, but explaining why they have had all the NCAA Tournament success in the past five years while North Dakota, Michigan State, Michigan, BC, and Minnesota keep coming up short is impossible without quickly discussing randomness. Which goes for Duluth's glory days of yore too. It's probably the most frustrating thing about college hockey for me. I've written about the illogical nature of the tourney format plenty before, how incompatible it is with a sport as random as hockey. As dumb as it all is, I don't even hate the variance of it so much as the lack thereof. We say the hockey tourney is random, but in my time following it, it actually isn't random. If it were a series of true coin flips and the title bounced around year to year to a variety of contenders for no particular reason, it would still suck as a concept but whatever. No, the infuriating part of the tournament right now is that it may well be a series of coin flips, but those coins always land the right side up for Denver and never for BC or Minnesota or Michigan or MSU. As it stands, the tournament is entirely predictable. Michigan will make the Frozen Four and lose. MSU will get upset in the early rounds. And when it's all said and done, Denver, as the 5th overall seed and two future NHLers, will win the tournament while being outshot 35-20 because a goalie named Bartholomew Greentree pulled a horseshoe out of his ass and stopped every shot for two weeks, while college hockey media tells us that's just the David Carle Difference. Time has been a flat circle in this tournament, just with Denver inheriting the Bulldog suit once worn by Duluth beginning in 2022, equipped with its magical powers. Those two programs have combined to win six of the last nine national titles. Coming via a single elimination hockey tournament, in which neither of those teams had overwhelming talent or dominance in the regular seasons relative to their competitors, it makes no sense at all. And that's the most confounding part. ---[David Wilcomes]Michigan has played a game in five NCAA Tournaments since I've been covering the team. In 2021 they made the field but never competed due to a COVID outbreak in the program; the 2020 team was on the bubble when the season was canceled by the pandemic. In all five they did play a game in, they made the Frozen Four. And in all five, they lost in the national semifinals, either to the team that won the national title (2022, 2023, 2026) or a team that was the 1st or 2nd overall seed in the field (2018, 2024). Like with the Denver and Duluth always win thing in my previous section, it seems like time is a flat circle here too. Yet each of the five appearances was slightly different in how they unfolded, just identical in how they ended. 2018 was an overachieving team that got hot down the stretch and won a couple tourney games but really were not a Frozen Four caliber team in the truest sense. They almost pulled an upset of a much better Notre Dame team but then the penalty kill, that had been their weakness all year, buried them. It sucked at the time but that one makes plenty of sense in my head. The same can be said for the 2024 team, which hit their (fairly apparent) ceiling by making the Frozen Four before playing a juggernaut BC team. They lost decisively, as everyone predicted. The other three were the years I went into the Frozen Four thinking a title was possible. 2022 was the top seed in the field, shaky after scraping by Quinnipiac. They went into Boston and just played tight, being outplayed and out-chanced by Denver, never leading in the game before losing in OT. A somewhat deserved fate for a team where the lights seemed perhaps a little too bright. The 2023 squad had their bumps in the road during the regular season but seemed to be peaking in March and I felt good going into that Frozen Four. They played a reasonable game against Quinnipiac but a poor goaltending performance helped unravel them against the disciplined Bobcats. That one sucked. [Bill Rapai]But this one, it was unlike all of those. It was the 1 team in the field like the 2022 squad but this time, they didn't play tight against Denver. Well kind of in the first 10 minutes or so. From then on, Michigan generally dominated the run of play. They killed penalties well. They tilted the ice. They peppered Johnny Hicks with shots. They worked back into the game, held two separate leads, and seemed ready to win. And then they didn't. The final shot count was 52-26 Wolverines. CHN's xG tabulation had 5.7-2.9 Michigan. The Wolverines were unquestionably the better team as we tend to define it, but as Sportsnet's Justin Bourne says, the goalie is on the team. On that day, Johnny Hicks was Denver's entire team and for the Pioneers, that was enough. It's the best that a Michigan team has played in a Frozen Four since I've been covering them, the first time I walked away not disappointed as much as feeling wronged. That they deserved better. That they were so close. None of those prior performance were like that. Sure, we were one goal away in 2022 and 2018 and entered the third period tied in 2023 so you can say it was so close. But when those seasons ended it was sort of a feeling like well, we didn't play that well tonight so we kind of deserved it. For this one, it was hard not to feel grief, both at losing a chance to see this group play more games in the abstract but also that they were going to be locked out of the national title game they ought to have played in. As my other coping mechanism, I largely didn't watch Saturday's title game because avoiding it felt healthy. I flipped over to check the score during commercial breaks of the hopeless Red Wings/Devils game early on. I caught a few minutes of the 3rd period after the Red Wing game ended, just in time to see Denver yoink another horseshoe out and tie a game they were being outshot something like 25-7 in. Then I went outside and shot some baskets because it was finally warm in Michigan again and later found out that Denver had, of course, taken the lead. I came inside to see the final couple minutes, laughing at the ridiculousness of Denver winning again in this fashion and taking some perverse pleasure from both Wisconsin not back-dooring their way to a title and a non-Michigan team ending the B1G's title drought. If it's not gonna be us, I hope it ain't any of them and for yet another year, it isn't us. ---On the heels of another Frozen Four loss for Michigan, there was a part of me that just had to ask the question, what's the point? The same question that has been asked by Detroit Lions, Buffalo Bills, Cleveland Guardians, Vancouver Canucks, Toronto Maple Leafs, Seattle Mariners, et al. fans over the years, the why do we do this to ourselves? big picture question. As I have generally come to believe, your answer to the question revolves around what you get out of sports fandom, and what you ultimately care about. This applies to college hockey most of all but to all the leagues in the modern age really, if all you care about is championships, then honestly, it might not be worth the time investment. It's really hard to win a championship, unless you happen to be the Team Of The Era, or the team that can never lose when it matters, in college hockey's case. There are many, many days along the way that happen over years before a championship and you better get something out of it, or else you probably should find better things to do. If you're a Michigan Hockey fan who gets nothing out of the journey and only cares about winning the national championship, then you should tune in when the NCAA Tournament starts. This program expects to make the tourney on a perennial basis and should continue to do so for many years to come. Nothing that happens from the start of October to late March really matters from a national title standpoint. Tune in then, watch a couple games, voilà. As I thought about it myself, it's hard to untangle my own feelings from my job. Right now, it's my job to watch all these Michigan Hockey games, so to some degree, that's why I watch. But obviously if I wasn't paid, I'd still follow them. I've devoted too much of my life to this program to just stop caring and tune it all out. The stories, the players, the memories, and the people I've covered it with along the way are a big part of the journey. Sports are as much about the games themselves as they are the people we share them with and I've been blessed with good people in the college hockey sphere over the years. For me, that's enough to justify it. Anyone who has friends who also follow the team, memories they've made as a Child of Yost, etc. can agree I'd imagine. With the lows come the highs [David Wilcomes]It was only something like ~40 hours after Michigan was eliminated that we got word from Elliotte Friedman and other NHL insiders that Michael Hage has spurned signing with Montreal for another year, to return to Michigan. Then, late last night, we got the nuclear bomb from Jeff Marek that Michigan may be bringing in two 1st round picks from the OHL in Jack Nesbitt of Windsor and Cameron Reid of Kitchener. With the way the winds seem to be blowing right now, I think 2026-27 seems like it could be Michigan's best team in a long, long time. An all-in, run it back, RedeemTeam sort of group that unites with one mission. And I'm not going to lie that it all reinvigorated me a bit. Insert your Michael Corleone just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in GIFs here. All you can really do when facing a tournament as fickle as the NCAA Hockey Tournament and the demons surrounding Denver is continue to put really good teams out there. Build top to bottom, front to back with talent, experience, and skill. This year's team was the best mix that they've had under Brandon Naurato and next year's has a chance to even better. Will that lead to a national championship? Who knows, but if nothing else, I hope next year is the one that finally grabs the B1G regular season crown. Maybe we can make that the focus of the campaign as a way to distract from the inevitable feeling that it'll all end with us being whacked in the back of the head with a 2x4 by a grinning David Carle.So that's where I leave you now. There are no HockeyBullets in this piece, nor any substantive recap. What is there to say about that game that I haven't covered? More evidence that we're cursed? If you wanted news from this piece, I can tell you that TJ Hughes signed in Colorado, I suppose. We're still waiting on Jayden Perron to make a decision and I assume a few depth pieces will transfer out in the coming days, as we await finalized decisions from CHL players. The long, six month offseason begins, while the dream that one day, the coin will flip our way remains. What I do know is that in all the pain and soul-searching that followed Thursday night, I found out that I am ready to do it one more time. After all, we've come this far. If I've seen five losses in the Frozen Four, what difference will a sixth make? I don't want to be the guy who turned off his TV early and missed the Jordan Poole shot. If Michigan Football eventually found a way to summit the Ohio State and Alabama mountain, and Michigan Men's Basketball finally found a way to win a national title game after four consecutive losses in that round, I believe that one year, the demons will be on Michigan Hockey's side. And that day, my friends, will be glorious. Log in or register to post comments CaliforniaNobody April 13th, 2026 at 3:44 PM ^ TL;DR- No question about it, I am ready to get hurt again. Joined: 12/18/2014 MGoPoints: 18235 Germany_Schulz April 13th, 2026 at 3:52 PM ^ In the 1960's-1970's, international soccer games when a team was up a goal with minutes left would literally just pass the ball back/forth to bleed the clock to full time. If Michigan is winning with 3 minutes left, why not just park the bus and pass the puck in a game of keep away behind the net for 3 minutes? Didn't Zetterberg for the Red Wings, in the Stanley Cup just skate in big circles for the final minutes to win? Next time we are up with less than 5 minutes left - go into super keep-away mode. Will always love the effort of this season's team. Go Blue. Joined: 11/28/2015 MGoPoints: 7114 In reply to In the 1960's-1970's, by Germany_Schulz Bando Calrissian April 13th, 2026 at 3:55 PM ^ It's so much easier to do that on a very large soccer field with a ball that doesn't move that quickly than it is in a fairly tight hockey rink with a puck that can zip from a bad pass into prime scoring position in about .5 seconds. Joined: 07/02/2008 MGoPoints: 74607 nmwolverine April 13th, 2026 at 3:54 PM ^ I don’t know much about hockey and rarely watch it. But I watched chunks of the Denver game. I was surprised how many times Michigan dumped the puck to the far end of the Denver side. They mostly lost possession of the puck by doing it. I found it counterproductive. In soccer, you would not relinquish possession all the time like that. Do any of you knowledgeable people think there were strategic errors made by the coaching staff? Being able to correct such errors would make a big difference going forward. Joined: 01/22/2009 MGoPoints: 1177 Bando Calrissian April 13th, 2026 at 4:00 PM ^ It's really interesting to read the perspective of someone who has only been in this for a few years and is still ready to get their heart stomped on again, versus those of us who have been on this ride since the '90s (or before) and have been saying that same thing since long before any of these players were born.If you had told me in 1998 when Josh Langfeld slipped in that game winner against BC that I'd still be waiting on the next one almost 30 years, 10 Frozen Fours, and 2 Hobey Baker winners later... I would not have believed it. Joined: 07/02/2008 MGoPoints: 74607 lhglrkwg April 13th, 2026 at 4:13 PM ^ Well said Alex. This one is less gutting in some ways because Michigan played fairly well and easily could have won that one...but in many more ways it's even more gutting than the other frozen fours since 2011 because they probably should have won. They played really great defense in the 3rd after taking the lead and of course Denver ties it was a ridiculous tip. It was such a small window that it's hard not to just feel like the Frozen Four is cursed for Michigan. Michigan is plenty talented enough to win and has had an almost ridiculously bad run of luck in the frozen four since 1998. 1-10 in Frozen Fours since then. Random pucks should've netted them a few more wins than that. I will keep continue watching as I always have but it is beyond deflating to get gut punched every single spring by this dumb tournament. Joined: 07/03/2008 MGoPoints: 102351 2026 ncaa hockey tournament 2026 frozen four