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It’s stretch-drive time in high school and college hockey as well, and high school and college girls and women have to get serious faster, because their seasons end before the guys.
While the UMD men’s hockey team it the road to Denver and came home with an impressive split, the Bulldogs women battled through two tough games at AMSOIL Arena and wound up losing 1-0 and tying 2-2 against North Dakota -- dropping the second game in a shootout.
In the women’s series, it’s hard to imagine two teams more evenly matched than the Bulldogs and the team formerly known as Fighting Sioux. They played fast, entertaining hockey, and the refs let it go a little, with North Dakota escaping with the 1-0 victory Friday.
On Saturday, it was almost a duplicate. UMD played better, but North Dakota offset the Bulldogs and after the 2-2 tie, UND got away with the extra point for winning the shootout. UMD is still in third place, but Minnesota and Wisconsin now seem out of reach. But maybe not. UMD travels to Wisconsin this weekend for a huge series, then they go to Minnesota for another huge series. They wind up at AMSOIL against Ohio State in three weeks, and that lone point given to North Dakota could prove pivotal for third place.
The top four, of course, get home ice for the first round of WCHA playoffs. But the jarring end of the Shannon Miller coaching era at UMD has only that one home series remaining, for certain.
The UMD men struggled by losing twice, once in a shootout, against Western Michigan. Losing at Denver 3-2 didn’t help anything last Friday, but bouncing back to beat the Pioneers 4-2 on Saturday was a huge boost and keeps the Bulldogs in the thick of a race that could still see five or six teams emerge as champion.
The Bulldogs return home to AMSOIL to face Northern Michigan this weekend, and it might be good timing to face a good team in a nonconference series. But the Bulldogs, along with getting back into winning rhythm, face some pressure to beat the Wildcats, just for the sake of the Pairwise ratings.
Some huge high school hockey games last week, also. Duluth East did a great job by going on the road to tie powerhouse Elk River 1-1 last Saturday, just as Hermantown found itself fit to be tied 3-3 at Cloquet-Esko-Carlton. Then East was stung for a 1-1 tie at Cloquet Monday. Marshall avoided Denfeld’s bid for a tie to win 4-2 on an open-net goal.
Meanwhile the high school girls, led by the Mirage, open Section 7AA tournament play this week, with quarterfinals on Thursday night. The boys are rapidly coming to the finish of the regular season, but the girls are already there, and now it’s win or go home!

John Gilbert has been writing sports for over 30 years. Formerly with the Star Tribune and WCCO. He currently hosts a daily radio show on KDAL AM.

Come On, NFL...Give Us More!

Since we’ve almost got football all around the calendar, and since Super Bowl 49 -- I’ve learned to count without using Roman Numerals -- was such a spectacular attraction, I have an idea to submit to the National Football League.
Why don’t we make it the World Series of Football, and bring back the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks to play a best-of-seven series to determine the real champion?
I had picked Seattle, because while I knew it was close, I thought the Seahawks had the better overall team, and I thought Seattle’s defense had a better chance of stopping Tom Brady and the Patriots than the very good Patriots defense had of stopping the Seahawks. I might have been right, but we’ll never know. Had Seattle coach Pete Carroll chosen to have Russell Wilson hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch at the 1 yard line, Lynch very well could have gone in for the touchdown with 20 seconds left, and we would be celebrating the Seahawks for a 31-28 victory rather than granting the Patriots their 28-24 triumph.
This is neither sour grapes, nor second-guessing. Carroll is getting universally slammed for having Wilson throw a quick slant-in for Ricardo Lockette, instead of handing the ball off to Lynch, and New England rookie safety Malcolm Butler stepped up, knocked Lockette over with a shoulder-to-shoulder hit at the goal line, and intercepted the pass -- astounding everybody in Phoenix stadium, including those wearing Patriots uniforms.
The game had boiled down to that moment after Tom Brady’s closing 8-for-8 passing lifted the Patriots from a 10-point deficit to that 28-24 lead. With one more chance, Wilson threw a great pass to Lynch up the left sideline. Then he threw an unbelievable pass up the right sideline for Jermaine Kearse, which Kearse batted away from Butler, then remarkably gathered in after he fell on his back. On a slow-motion replay, I thought I counted eight or nine times the ball bounced off Kearse’s assorted hands and legs before he grabbed it securely.
That’s what gave the Seahawks an incredible new life, inside the 10, with time running out. Lynch, the NFL’s best running back, crashed to the 1. All the cynics and experts agree in their second-guessing manner that Lynch would get the ball again and crash into the end zone to win the game for the Seahawks. I offer a different slant on that.
The game was a fascinating coaching chess match between Pete Carroll and New England’s Bill Belichick. Both knew what the other had in mind throughout the game, and even better, both knew that the other knew. While all of us “knew” Lynch would get the ball, Belichick knew it, and Carroll knew Belichick had prepared a goal-line defensive set-up. So it was time to cross up the ol’ master.
When Carroll took time out to map the final play, I thought he would have Wilson fake the handoff to Lynch, and while Lynch hurtled into the mob scene at the goal line, Wilson would sprint out to the left, and either find a hole to run it in himself, or, if nothing was there, he could toss it to any of several potential receivers. Instead, they went for a quick pass. My only criticism was that the slant pattern Wilson threw went directly at the heart of the goal-line defense that Carroll and Wilson were trying to cross-up. Too much congestion.
But I’m not going to blame Carroll, or Wilson, whose combined magic tricks had snatched victory from the Green Bay Packers two weeks earlier in the NFC championship game, having already teamed up to earn legendary status by crushing the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl 48 a year ago.
Carroll took the blame, and so did Wilson. Other Seahawks said it was a team thing, and they had no animosity about the call. TV cynics questioned that. I don’t. I heard one interesting factoid, and I don’t even know if it’s accurate. Word is, during the season Lynch had tried to score on seven plays from various 1-yard lines, and had made it one time. That’s because other teams also anticipated the best running back getting the ball in such a situation.
In the final analysis, we can say we wish Carroll had tried something else. It was only second down, so if the Seahawks ran my Wilson sprint-out, they still could have come back and tried Lynch. But with only 20 seconds remaining, they didn’t have a lot of time to regroup.
Nevertheless, it was one of the most captivating Super Bowls we’ve been able to watch. I felt sympathy for the Seahawks that they were missing a couple of key players on defense, and incomparable cornerback Richard Sherman was playing with one arm that may now need surgery to repair. Then Jeremy Lane made an early interception at the Seahawks goal line and, on the runback, broke his wrist and was gone. Shortly after that, defensive end Cliff Avril went down after a nasty helmet-to-helmet collision, and was carted away with a concussion.
That reduced Seattle’s vaunted “Legion of Doom” defense to something less than that. Tom Brady set a record by capitalizing on the replacement parts, picking apart the battered secondary for 36 pass completions.
Then, of course, we had plenty of time for the traditional Super Bowl ads. The winner, according to everybody’s poll, was the one with the puppy who loves his farm’s big Clydesdale Budweiser horses but gets trapped inside a trailer and winds up miles away from home. He finds his way back, but near the end, he is confronted by a wolf, snarling and threatening -- until the Clydesdale’s come to the rescue.
There were others, too, but I agree the overall tone of the ads was disappointing in some ways. The tragic one of the kid who wouldn’t grow up to do anything or be anybody because he had already been killed, so buy insurance and be careful...please!
Interestingly enough, all the listings of the top 5 or top 10 or top 20 failed to list my favorite, and the one I declare as the clear winner: The Chevrolet Colorado pickup commercial. It came on before the kickoff, so was apparently missed by all the poll-takers (poll cats?). I was in the kitchen, scooping up some wonderful dip made by my wife, Joan, on some veggies, and I saw the TV go to black. That caught my attention. I thought we had lost the satellite signal. Then I spotted a very thin, very small line of type, and I scurried into the Great Room of the Gilbert Compound just in time to read it. It said something like, what would you do if you lost your TV signal right now? It proceeded to tell us that if we had lost the signal, but had bought a 2015 Colorado pickup, we could have saved the day by going out to the pickup and streamed the game, live, on a computer via the built-in Wifi hot-spot.
Of course, most people might not know that one of the neat General Motors features for connectivity in its new vehicles is the availability to make them into a Wifi hot spot.
Tying that one for first, in my books, was the Fiat commercial that at first seemed like a Viagra commercial. This older fella gets summoned to the bedroom by his wife, who has adopted a seductive pose. He grins and hustles to the bathroom where he finds that he only has one remaining pill. Sure enough, it slips out of his grasp, bounces out of the open window, and ricochets through an amazingly circuitous course before accidentally going into the fuel tank of a Fiat 500. Suddenly the little 500 starts to stretch and grow -- larger and larger. This one, too, might have been lost on the non-automotive millions who maybe didn’t know that Fiat has decided to make a new and enlarged version of the 500, stretching it from a cute little runabout coupe into a compact crossover SUV. I have friends who thought that was a Viagra commercial, until I informed them it was indeed a Fiat commercial, and a clever one, at that.
In the game itself, there were assorted unexpected heroes who stepped up in every quarter and made big catches or big defensive plays, enhancing the competitiveness and explosiveness of both teams. No question, it was a thoroughly enjoyable football game. It just ended so unexpectedly, that I was left wanting more. So come on, NFL, how about six more? A best of seven for the Super Bowl. Seven consecutive Sundays. All they have to do is promise to be finished by State Hockey Tournament time.

Hockey Takes Over, at All Levels

   Despite rambling ravings by the Twin Cities media, it’s still too early to be giving up on the Minnesota Wild. I have maximum faith in Chuck Fletcher’s managing and Mike Yeo’s coaching, and I still think the current Wild roster is solid, from top to bottom The reinforcements Fletcher brought in didn’t all dazzle me. I was so impressed with the way the Wild finished in the playoffs last season, that I thought all the elements were in place. The young guys looked promising, the veterans were solid leaders, and we hadn’t even gotten to see the full-fledged impact of a Matt Cooke yet. I liked the idea of Finns down the middle -- Mikko Koivu, Mikhail Granlund, and Eric Haula -- all lending the bred-in belief that centermen must make plays offensively, but first and foremost they tend to defense.
I was not, therefore, overwhelmed with the addition of Tomas Vanek. Yes, he’s a former Gopher who can score goals, but no, there is nothing in his pedigree to indicate that he is a consummate team player who puts the welfare of his teammates and team success ahead of his personal scoring feats. But they got him. My belief was that when a team is so dependent on team chemistry as the Wild, it is a delicate balance that needs nurturing, and the addition of a big gun who may lack that team chemistry impact may disrupt it.
There have been problems, of course. Returning goaltenders Darcy Kuemper and Niklas Backstrom both have had their share of making this a weird season, with injuries, ailments, and various sickness levels. The Wild started to struggle in December, and neither goaltender seemed healthy enough to regain their previous command and steal a couple of victories here and there. I defended both goaltenders, believing that either or both could still be the answer this season, if they ever can find their rhythm.
It was more difficult to defend the team defense. Ryan Suter proved himself to be one of the NHL’s true elite blueliners, but his lengthy stretches of ice time were suddenly becoming a liability more than an asset. In fact, the bottom of the Wild fall can be traced to Suter’s woes -- he went from a solid plus-12 to a scary minus-9 in a three-week span. Ironically, he got a break but couldn’t take it, because he was the Wild’s only representative named to the All-Star game.
Of course, there was Zach Parise’s well-publicized emotional rollercoaster when his dad, the much-loved J.P. Parise, died from a year-long battle with lung cancer.
When things were at their worst, and bandwagon-climbers were jumping off into the abyss by the day, Fletcher made a move to acquire someone named Devan Dubnyk, a little-known goalie from Arizona. He started out of desperation and got a shutout. And he hasn’t looked back. While Backstrom and Kuemper may still be the answers in goal, Dubnyk is doing a pretty fair imeprsonation of a star goaltender.
Last week the Wild went off to Canada, and beat Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver, all in a row. Low-scoring games, and Dubnyk made sure the Wild would only need a goal or two to win. Since arriving, he went 5-1 with a 1.71 goals-against average and a sparkling .935 save percentage. For the week, h was 3-0 with 1.00 and .967 stats.
When a goaltender comes up with a big save, or a period-full of big saves, the effect is remarkable on a team. The players react, physically, and they react even more mentally. Suddenly they quit wondering how they’re going to get a goal, or mount a comeback, and instead they trade in that drudgery for fire and excitement. Sure enough, those stats were compiled before the Wild came home to face the mighty Chicago Blackhawks. As if to show off their renewed energy, Koivu, Jason Zucker and Granlund scored goals for a 3-0 lead after two periods, and Dubnyk was rock-solid.
Wild beat Chicago 3-0 -- exactly the kind of spurt they needed to hoist themselves up in the standings and back into contention for a playoff spot.