Way to go Chargers

I was enjoying Spring Break so I didn't blog about this at the time, but I want to give a big "shout out" to my former school's hockey team. Despite a long and mostly successful history as the only varsity hockey program in the South (really, I'm not kidding), this year was a down year for the UAH Chargers. Despite going in as the bottom seed in the CHA tournament, they somehow managed to win the tourney and capture the automatic berth into the NCAA tournament.

Unlike the more popular NCAA tourney, the hockey tournament only includes 16 teams, so UAH earned a spot in a select group. Like the basketball competition, however, there are some automatic qualifiers, such as UAH, that really don't belong. As a result, UAH was seeded 16th (last) overall and slated to skate against #2 Notre Dame (#1 Minnesota played the #15 rather than the #16 seed for geographical reasons). Despite the Chargers' claiming they could skate with ND and ND's comments about how they were taking the game seriously, everyone knew it was going to a cakewalk for the Irish. Then they played the game.

Unfortunately UAH was not able to pull off the upset, but they did extend the game deep into two overtimes before falling 3-2. Given that college hockey is not as popular as college football or basketball it's hard to explain how monumental the Chargers' effort was. I know there have been a few cases of 15 seeds beating 2 seeds in the hoops tourney, but this is different. ND was the second overall seed in the tourney (probably Ohio State or NC this year) and UAH was the little team that had no business being there if not for an automatic berth given to a weak conference (akin to the winner of the "play in" game in the BB tourney -- this year it was Niagara). For the record, Niagara lost its opening round game by 40 points! But UAH fell behind 2-0 within the first 5 minutes, then managed to fight back and push ND through 1.75 periods of sudden death overtime. While the national implications wouldn't have been as great, it wouldn't have been too far behind (in my opinion) the Miracle on Ice in terms of just a pure hockey upset. [Okay, that's probably hyperbole, but it would've been huge.]

Regardless, the Chargers came up a little short. While I am suspicious of "moral victories" when a team loses a game, I think this might have been one for a program that may find itself without a conference in a couple of years. Hopefully this'll get the Chargers some more national attention and open up some opportunities for them in one of the more established conferences. So congrats to the Chargers. You'll get 'em next year!