When someone talks about a college tournament, with lots of upsets, the thoughts usually go straight to the Division One basketball tournament, known as March Madness, but this year’s college hockey tournament had no shortage of madness.
College hockey has a different format than basketball, due to being a smaller market with less teams. The college tournament starts with 16 teams, 6 of which won their conference and the other 10 determined by regular season play, giving bids to the best 10 teams remaining in the eyes of the selection committee.
The image here was the bracket at the start of the tournament. There are four regions where the games are played, each region having a one-seed. Boston College, Maine, Western Michigan, and Michigan State were this year’s one seeds. The tournament started with madness right away when Michigan state, the 2nd ranked team nationally lost to Cornell, who barely snuck into the tournament this year. Another one seed fell shortly after, Maine got rolled by Penn State in a shocking game. Boston College was on the verge of also getting eliminated, they were tied 1-1 with a minute left but managed to pull it off and move on to the Elite Eight games. Mr. Steve Reed was in attendance for that game and mentioned how exciting it was to watch. The number one seeded BC did not make it out of their region though, as the national champs of the previous year, Denver knocked them off for back-to-back years. Penn State continued their impressive play and earned their first ever ticket to the final four. Boston University ended Cornells Cinderella run and Western continued to play strong and made it out as the only seed to survive their region.
The final four was set, these games happened two weeks after regional games and these were hosted in St. Louis. The first matchup was Denver vs Western Michigan which was a rematch of their conference championship when Western won in overtime. This time around it was quite similar, another overtime matchup that resulted in Western moving on with a 3-2 win over the previous national champs. The other semifinal matchup was Boston University vs Penn State. Two very high-powered offenses were ready to match up. Goaltending ended up being the story of this game though as Boston University was able to hold Penn State to one goal and win 3-1.
Boston University and Western Michigan were now set as the 2025 college hockey national championship. This game was back and forth for a large majority of the game. It was tight and physical but in the third period Western pulled away and won the game 6-2. This was Western’s first ever national championship win, and they are building a new rink on campus, both of which will be huge factors in recruiting and potentially forming a new dynasty in college hockey.
