While most Dartmouth students will be in the midst of admiring the snow sculpture, dancing at the Swing Ball and partying hard all over campus, the Big Green men's hockey team will continue their quest for the playoffs with two tough road tilts this weekend.
The Green (9-9-3 overall, 5-8-1 ECAC, 9th place) are enjoying their best season since the 1979-80 campaign, but if they are to make the postseason or get home-ice advantage in the first round, they will need to make the most of their last eight games, starting with tonight's game against Colgate and tomorrow night's matchup versus Cornell.
With these two games being the fifth and sixth straight contests for the Green away from home, Head Coach Bob Gaudet recognizes that the squad might be a bit road-weary: "We've been in the midst of a brutally tough schedule I think, and it's not going to lighten up for us ... Colgate and Cornell are tough places to play, and they will be very physical contests. What we have to do is stay focused like we have been on one game at a time and really just give it our best each and every game."
The 1997-98 season has been a long odyssey for Dartmouth. It started off way back on Oct. 31 with a 7-0 drubbing of Army, but then the Green dropped three of their next four, with their only win coming in a 4-0 road shutout of Union. The next three games were all ties -- against Vermont, UMass-Amherst and Merrimack -- but the Green were picking up steam.
Over Christmas break the Green beat Bowling Green 6-2 and then Providence 4-1 to win the Sheraton/USAirways holiday tournament. More importantly, they showed they could win in Gutterson Fieldhouse, the home rink of the Vermont Catamounts, which would loom large later in the season.
The Green came into 1998 with a head of steam, but they lost their next three games -- to Harvard, Brown and Princeton -- by a total of just four goals.
But whereas Dartmouth teams of years past might have packed it in for the season after losing so many tight games, this year's edition came back strong, and on Jan. 11 the Green shocked the Yale Bulldogs, the league leaders, by a 4-3 count at Thompson Arena.
The Green again and again have showed their ability to bounce back from a tough loss. After a tight 4-3 defeat to Clarkson, the Green came back the very next night and beat St. Lawrence 4-1. A loss to Denver the following weekend was followed up just three days later with a huge 2-1 overtime win over UMass-Lowell in the first game ever played in Lowell's new Tsongas Arena.
The Big Green then strung together two of their best games of the season back-to-back. They went into Gutterson Fieldhouse and annihilated Vermont 6-1, beating the Catamounts in their own building for the first time since 1980. Then last weekend they beat up St. Lawrence 5-2 in Appleton Arena. But last Saturday Clarkson took advantage of their home ice and superior size and outmuscled the Green 5-1.
Which brings us to this weekend's contests against Colgate and Cornell. Gaudet said both teams are quality squads, and said the Green will have to be on top of their game.
"Colgate is an extremely skilled team, they can play any style. What they have over a lot of teams is the ability to put the puck away. While they didn't do it last weekend, that's only temporary. They'll be able to do it again," Gaudet said. "And Cornell has clearly the best goalie in the ECAC, and maybe in college hockey," Gaudet said of the Big Red's Jason Elliott. "He's a guy who's been the MVP in the ECAC playoffs for the championship team the past two years. When the chips are down ... he's a stopper."
Gaudet was noncommittal over which of his two steady goaltenders -- Eric Almon '00 or Jason Wong '00 -- would see more work for the remainder of the regular season. "Both are good kids, both have worked very hard. And I told the guys we need both of them down the stretch for us to be successful here," the head coach said.
The Green are in ninth place, but a four-point weekend could vault them to as high as fourth, so there is a lot riding on these two games -- and of course, on the last six games of the regular season after this weekend.
"It's really gonna be a dogfight," Gaudet said. "Every game has so much riding on it. Every game is gonna be tough. We're just trying to take it one game at a time, and hopefully we'll be rewarded at the end."
