Gophers' Frozen Four quest starts today against defending NCAA champion Massachusetts

A year ago on the front range of the Rocky Mountains, Bob Motzko saw his goal of taking his Gophers men's hockey team to the NCAA Frozen Four come up a victory short with a 4-0 loss to Minnesota State Mankato in the Loveland (Colo.) Regional.

The Mavericks were the ones heading to Pittsburgh, and joining them would be two other Minnesota teams, St. Cloud State and Minnesota Duluth. Missing out on that chance to showcase the state's hockey talent was a bitter pill for Motzko.

"It hurts,'' he said after the game. "We wanted to be a part of that.''

A year later, Motzko will have a second crack at the NCAA tournament with his Minnesota team, opening play in the NCAA Worcester (Mass.) Regional. The Gophers face Massachusetts at 5 p.m. Friday (ESPNU) and will try to accomplish something three Minnesota teams couldn't a year ago — beat the Minutemen, who dispatched Bemidji State, UMD and St. Cloud State in succession to win their first NCAA championship.

A victory Friday would put the Gophers in the regional final against the Western Michigan-Northeastern winner for a trip to the Frozen Four, April 7-9 in Boston.

"It's exciting. Everyone in that locker room is pretty pumped up,'' said sophomore defenseman Brock Faber, who had five assists in the Gophers' 7-2 NCAA win over Nebraska Omaha last year. "We're ready to go. Playing on this stage is what you dream of as a kid.''

It's also what's expected from one of college hockey's blue bloods.

Motzko, hired away from St. Cloud State following the 2017-18 season, is in his fourth season with the Gophers and is trying to end a couple of long droughts for the program in the NCAA tournament. Minnesota's last national championship was in 2003 — the second of back-to-back titles with Motzko as an assistant for Don Lucia — and its last Frozen Four appearance was in 2014, when it lost 7-4 to Union in the championship game. Six NCAA tournaments have been played since the Gophers last appeared in the Frozen Four — the 2020 tournament was wiped out by COVID-19 — and that matches the program's second-longest stretch without reaching the national semifinals. The longest was nine from 1962 through '70.

After an 18-16-4 record in 2018-19 and a 16-14-7 mark in the COVID-19-shortened 2019-20 season, Motzko has the program trending upward. Last season, the Gophers won 24 games, captured the Big Ten tournament title and earned a No. 1 NCAA regional seeding. They won the conference regular-season title this year and enter the NCAA tournament as a No. 2 regional seed with a 24-12 record built on a 14-4 mark since Christmas.

The Gophers will face a Massachusetts team that is 22-12-2 this season and has won 94 games over the past four years. The Minutemen featured Hobey Baker Award winner Cale Makar during their NCAA runner-up season in 2019. Coach Greg Carvel inherited a program that was 8-24-4 in 2015-16 and led it to back-to-back national title games. UMass boasts a deep defensive corps, a tournament-tested goalie in Matt Murray and an offensive dynamo in Bobby Trivigno, a former Shattuck-St. Mary's standout who was last year's Frozen Four Most Outstanding Player.

The Minutemen have allowed two goals or fewer in their past 10 postseason games, and Carvel revels in that identity.

"Skill is great,'' he said, "but grit is more important. Not much of the game is stickhandling. Most of the game is running into each other, and you've got to find guys who enjoy running into each other.''

The Gophers will try to break through UMass' defensive web with a roster that features Olympians in Faber, center Ben Meyers and left winger Matthew Knies and 14 NHL draft picks. They're confident their team can be a major factor in college hockey's biggest tournament.

"There's a lot of history that goes behind playing for the Gophers that we take pride in, so we're really looking forward to building on that history and making history for ourselves,'' Faber said.