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That Sums It Up

For all practical purposes, my hockey season is over.  I did my last announcing/music youth game at the Chisholm Sports Complex on March 4^th, I saw my last high school game at the Xcel Energy Center on March 10 and I’ll tie up the loose ends of the Rink Rat Review this week.  Oh, there is still more hockey and plenty of it with the various Minnesota Hockey youth levels state tournament this week-end, the NCAA and the Pro’s, plus my son has the six week 4 on 4 Spring league that starts on the 26^th, but for me personally, after I finish this article and post it on the RRR, my season is all but over.  So, how did it go for the 2011-2012 season, then?  It did not start off well.  As I have repeated from time to time, I am never ready as autumn is my favorite time of the year.  I spend most days out in the woods cutting and splitting firewood.  Just me and mama nature.  All of a sudden, I have to get rinkratreview.com updated for the new IRC high school hockey season and all the schedules and draws for all our Hibbing-Chisholm Youth Hockey Association home tournaments.  So much hockey and so little time.   

So what could possibly happen for the season to start off so lousy?  I’m late every year and by now everyone should be used to that.    My season actually started with the new Junior Hockey League team in town called the Iron Range Ironheads.  I announced their first three home games at the Chisholm Arena and then pulled the plug.  Truth be told, it’s not my brand of hockey.  At least I got to see them win their first game.  They had a so-so season and I wish Steve Chelios and his crew a vastly improved 2^nd season, but with my U-10, U-12, squirt, pee wee, bantam and high school schedule, I am already beyond my limitations.  Any extra hockey would be devoted to the Gophers whom I hadn’t seen play all year until the Final Five.  As you can see, my winters are booked up. 

I was thinking that with my son now in 10^th grade primed and ready for high school hockey, perhaps my schedule would be less hectic.  He would drop from 35+ games, to 25+ games and I would not be doing as much announcing.  Not so as that plan was scrubbed on November 19^th when he and seven other kids were cut from the high school team.  I was incredulous, as were others, as to this turn of events.  Just last year, I vehemently protested when they came down and rustled off with two of our Bantam players.  This was to be my 16^th season with the Rink Rat Review and if there is one universal consistency in all those years, it was bemoaning the fact of how our numbers up here in the northland are dwindling.  These kids have other options.  When I was in high school, we didn’t have such options.  We played football or cross country in the fall, hockey, wrestling, or basketball in the winter and golf, tennis, track or baseball in the spring.  Three letter sports were commonplace for many of my classmates.  We were seasonal kids and did not play hockey in the off-season.  Now we have all these complaints about how we can’t keep pace with these top hockey teams anymore and pack our kids off to summer hockey camps.  School had just started last fall and I saw one of my son’s hockey mates, a freshman, and asked him if he was playing football and he said no as he is putting all his effort into hockey.  He beamed about   a $2,000.00 hockey camp he went to.  I hope his investment was returned in spades.  I have no idea if it was hockey’s gain, but it was certainly football’s loss.  As for my son, he’s  an honor roll student, plays varsity football, member of the Drama Club (Fall Musical “Grease”; One Act Play: Clear Bright Day; Spring Play “You Can’t Take It With You”) member of Boy Scout Troop 1 (working on his eagle) and an obvious candidate for the High School Hockey Team.  The upside to him not playing organized hockey this year was the invaluable help he gave me in the 10 tournaments the Hibbing-Chisholm Youth Hockey Association hosted this year.  On account of other commitments, he was only able to get in 94 games this season.  Now you may be asking, if he got in 94 games, how many did his Dad do?  What began as a downsized agenda, turned out to be a 127 game season.  See ya at the rink!     

State Of Mind

So here we are at one of the premier hockey arenas in the nation watching the #1 high school sporting event in the nation and the Minnesota State High School League has to be pleased as punch.  According to the information I had received a couple years ago, all the Minnesota State Tournaments were lined up from top to bottom according to attendance and income and you can bet your sweet patoot that all the rest of the state high school league tournaments are a distant second.  The total attendance of hockey was more than all the rest combined.  Now it didn’t seem like that last Wednesday in the Class A Q-Finals as both the crowd and the games were sparse.  What seems to be happening in the opening round is a weeding out of the bottom feeders and a prepping for the semi-finals that usually makes for a couple of interesting games, at least on paper.

Anyway, I did not have a team from the Iron Range Conference down here to cover so I had to pull for Section 7 and they are represented by two teams I have come to know and not like: Duluth Marshall, 7A and Duluth East, 7AA.  Marshall went two and out and East was upset by Lakeville South in the Q-Final round along with the other seeded teams in what Randy, the WMFG Radio guy called “Black Thursday!”  Mary Roy, a hockey mom from Grand Rapids, called it “history making!”  There is one universal consistency and that is every once in a blue moon I have to depend on East and they consistently let me down.  It all started in that epic 1996 5 overtime S-Final against eventual winner Apple Valley in which East won sometime in the 3^rd overtime, but only those of us sitting up from the goal crease saw the puck go in and out.   We were shocked to see that they just kept on playing.  Rumor has it, that sometime in the 4^th overtime, Mike Randolph turned to his coaches and players on the bench and remarked “the next goal is gonna really be big!”

This year’s tournament was rather flat for me and I found myself doing the unthinkable, pulling for a private school.  I cannot condemn myself fully though, as this has turned into something akin to voting for a political candidate where you find yourself pulling for the lesser of two evils.  Back in my carefree days prior to joining the media, my brother and I would sell our tickets and go see a Gopher playoff game rather than having to watch two metropolitan teams spit at each other.  The thought of having to be chained to my press box stool with toothpicks keeping my eyelids open forcing me to witness two private schools vying for the Class AA Championship is completely incomprehensible, but when one of the teams is the “Jack Pack” (my term for Benilde-St. Margaret), they are definitely the sentimental favorite.  There were five of us hanging on to a very thin thread of what was left of the high school hockey season.  We had already “wretched” at the Class A final between St. Thomas Academy and Hermantown.  The situation has to be highly desperate for me to pull for the Hawks and you Iron Rangers out there know where I am coming from, eh?  They blitzed through their three game sectionals with a 22-1 scoring advantage.  Entering the tournament undefeated and the #1 seed, I almost felt sorry for them, feeling that they were the underdogs in facing off against St. Thomas Academy, technically, a AA team.  Had Hermantown shown up and made a game of it, they would have had the backing of those in attendance, but the game was lost at the drop of the puck.  Well, anyway, as my brother noted, they won the public school championship.  Not so for the “Jack Pack” as their seasonal emotional roller coaster was on a non-stop unbreakable ride and Hill-Murray could not stem the tide.  Interesting to note that word on the street is that Hill-Murray raised $25,000.00 for the Jack Jablonski Fund.  Mixed emotions in the final high school hockey game of the season. See ya at the rink!     

ALMOST OVER

And then there was one.  Nine conference teams are done for the season save for that one.  There have been quite a few articles I have written in the past relating to the end of the hockey season and the amount of snow still hanging around.  Can you imagine waking up to go to school on February 10^th when it hits you that your hockey season is over.   It ended the night before in a Sectional Playoff Game.  It all comes so sudden and for seniors, even more so.  For the miniscule select few that have a college scholarship or are going into juniors, their hockey life is still alive, but for the ninety nine and forty four one hundreds percent of the rest, their hockey life flashes before their eyes all the way back to even before mites.  So many kids are skating well before the age of reason that they cannot ever remember not doing so.  As each season is approaching the inevitable end, every team strives to extend it by at least one more game, even if it means facing the dreaded #1seeded team in the section and a possible blow-out.  There have been, once in a blue moon, a world shaking upset, such as the one that happened 32 years ago this month, but for the most part, it is a lop-sided game and this season is no different.  Let’s take a look at those 16 quarter-final ho-hum games and the magnanimous disparity of the agony of defeat.  The #1 seed in every section faced either a #8 or #9 seeded team and the results are a perennial disaster.  The closest games were two 6-0 affairs that happened in Section 8A & Section 4AA and the first thing I thought of is that sometime in the 3^rd period, it became running time so that means that all 16 games had running time.  Here are some items that may be of uninterest to you.  Biggest blow-out:  Section 1AA  19-0 (that’s a goal in a little over every 2 ½ minutes);  9 shutouts with an average of 9-0; goals for/against 169-8 (average score for the 16 games: 10-0); #1 seed reaching the section final: every one so far (Section 4AA #1 seed Hill-Murray semi-final game is not until the 29th); lowest seeded team reaching section finals: Section 3AA #6 seed Hastings vs #1 seed Eagan.  Sounds like I am desperate for that big upset.  If it happens, I hope it’s in overtime.  Okay, enough of the trivial, let’s get down to what really matters.  Let’s revert back to the opening sentence.  We are pinning the hopes of the conference on the last team standing: #2 seed Hibbing-Chisholm Bluejackets will face-off against #1 seed Duluth Marshall Hilltoppers tomorrow at the Amsoil Arena in Duluth (weather permitting).  It has come down to this and for Hibbing-Chisholm it is the 10^th year in a row.  They certainly have the experience in playing in this game.  They are the defending Section 7A champs and Duluth Marshall is foaming at the mouth to change all that.  The two teams met on November 29^th and it was a 5-2 Marshall victory.  Being that it is the playoffs, both teams have thrown that out the window.  Look at what happened to Grand Rapids in the 7AA Q-Final game losing to Forest Lake 3-2 after beating them 6-0 during the regular season.  Yep, it’s section final time again and I’ll be there.  Do you think there will be overtime?  See ya at the rink!      

Dateline…Thursday, February 2,  Hibbing Memorial  Arena and another classic conference clash of the titans as the International Falls Broncos came down from the hinterland to face off in a nice friendly encounter with the Hibbing-Chisholm Blue Jackets.  If I worked at a regular paper, my editor would stop me right there and point out that it is coherently impossible to use the words Broncos, Blue Jackets and friendly in the same sentence.  If there is a certain universal  consistency that has developed through the years,  in this neck of the woods, is the intense passion these teams have in their dislike for each other and it surfaced, once again, after the final buzzer.  Not sure what the fisticuffs were all about, but nothing came of it, which seemed quite odd. 

H-C came out on top 3-2 and out shot the Falls 33-28.  In essence, it was a good game with lots of action and the local fans were pleased and happy with the victory.  I, on the other hand, thought differently.  First off, H-C barely escaped with their lives.  If I were on the coaching staff, I would play anyone in the sectionals, but the Falls.  Two things developed in the game.  Another defensive breakdown by H-C and the Falls couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn.  I neither wish nor desire to paraphrase Herbie the Hockey God, but HC’s defense is playing worse each game and now they are playing like they are in the middle of next week.  The Falls had a festival of open nets to shoot into and were robbed with the first one with Tyler Carlson’s save of the season.  H-C had their turn at one point by having the honor of making my chuckle play of the day with an open net miss of their own.  I didn’t catch the player number, but he almost fainted at the opportunity and after he shot, postured a pseudo-collapse and had to think, “How on God’s Green Earth” could I have missed on that one.  Even I could have made that one from where I was standing.  Each team had their fair share of miscues which they best iron out as the regular season is about over and if they do meet in the sectionals, there is no tomorrow.  See ya at the rink!

OUT OF THE GATE

Okay, okay so the season has already started.  So what’s your point?  Is it to confirm the fact that it’s been almost a month now and you just want to make me wallow in misery on account of I am late getting started AGAIN!  You should all be used to that by now since it’s been 16 YEARS IN A ROW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  One thing is for certain, if I had a regular sports reporter type job, everything would be on schedule, just like a perfect world.  Now wouldn’t that be unbelievably amazing, me, in a regular job?

Anyway, I was in attendance, once again, at the jamboree in Virginia and I have to say that I was most impressed with the West Range end of things, as out of the six teams, Grand Rapids & Greenway impressed me the most.  At the moment, they are (1-0) (3-0) & (1-0) (3-1) respectively.  The Grand Rapids Thunder Hawks have some big skates to fill as they went (7-0) (23-4-1) last season.  Greenway had another sub-500 record again last year and they started the season with 9 losses in a row.  Last year in their first 3 games, they were outscored 13-5, but they have had a big turnaround this year as they played the same 3 teams and outscored them, 19-8.  They will be back in the IRC and play all the conference teams this year except Grand Rapids.  Eveleth-Gilbert had a perfect .500 record last season at 13-13 and went 2-6 in the conference.  It will be a chore to reach that mark this year.  They have a junior by the name of Cole Jackson, who is an all-around athlete and should be their go-to guy.  My unknown quantities this year are Hibbing-Chisholm, International Falls and Virginia MIBC.  Of the 3, VMIBC had the best record at 20-8, but lost to Hibbing-Chisholm 5-0 at the DECC in the section final.  One could say that it was probably the worst game they played all season.  They did everything wrong whilst Hibbing-Chisholm did everything right.  When I think of the International Falls Broncos, I think of those perennial power-house teams from the 60’s, eh?  What a dynasty Larry Ross built up there in the hinterland.  For those of you who had seen the 1972 State Tournament final between them and the then Grand Rapids Indians witnessed a classic.  There I go again, living in the past.  Well, when it comes to high school hockey, that is where all my great memories are.  So here is hoping that this year will become another great memory.  See ya at the rink!