Badger Showdown Day 2: Sometimes a Great Notion

By: Charlie Danoff

Did you miss the Day 1 piece? You should probably go back and read that first…

Getting to the game itself, the stadium was packed to the brims, despite only being a consolation game. Even if winning their own tournament was out of the question, the Badger players and fans certainly did not want to finish LAST. That would be like kissing a thousand of your sisters or something.

Accordingly, Wisconsin played like the #13 team in the country with a roster featuring five NHL prospects. In each of the first two periods they scored two goals to Bowling Green’s one, and they added an insurance goal in the third to coast to a 5-2 victory. While the game itself was not too close, it was fun to watch an elite team playing up to its potential. Afterwards, coach Mike Eaves talked about the importance of salvaging the win for his team and using it as a building block headed into the season’s second half. Considering the dominating Badger performance, Colgate winning the game the night before was even more impressive.

OK, I tried my best to be objective, but I’m only a really pathetic human.

Aside from the action, the game’s highlights included everyone in the stadium yelling and clapping every time a score from the Patriots-Giants game was announced. I am not sure exactly what Madison residents have against Bill Belichick and his players, but they were darn excited to hear that they were losing through the first few quarters.

The other high point occurred during an on-ice altercation. One cheap shot after another escalated rather quickly, and soon all five players on both teams were at each other’s throats. I was hoping the goalies would get into it - à la Mike Vernon and Patrick Roy from the Redwings-Avs playoff series a few years back - but neither goalie had the balls.

While this was exciting enough, what really caught my eye was the entire north end of the stadium dancing to some sort of Badger fight song. It was not just that everyone was dancing, but that all their moves were insanely synchronized. I am talking about at least 2,000 people, all moving as one. It took the cake as the most impressive display of college spirit I have seen in person. The previous holder of that title was the oscillating “Waves” at Michigan’s Big House.

After the game, I was tired from a long day of hard-nosed investigative reporting. Of course, before I got home, I had to get lost driving back to my hotel through Madison’s labyrinth of streets. Never mind the fact that my hotel was less than a mile away, and by this point I had made the drive about four times.

By the time I crawled back into my room, I sat down in my lounge chair and cracked open a can of Diesel. Something dropped and I thought deeply into the early morning about how everything in life is related to circles. Ya know, a sort of wheel of samsara or something. Between sips, I was enacting a physical metaphor of my dancing subconscious as I twisted my Budweiser bottle round and round. I ultimately came to the conclusion that the only question that matters is: can you create a better tomorrow?

Soon afterwards I passed out, sleeping into the early afternoon again. My hopes of creating a better tomorrow took a hit when I spoke to my father as I was driving out of town around 1:30. He asked what time I expected to be home, as he and my mother needed the car, after being nice enough to lend it to me the entire weekend. Let’s just say when I said I’d be home around five, his response was a little more substantive than the pop-philosophical conclusion I came to the evening prior.

“Morning”

(knock, knock) on the door.

(knock, knock, knock)

…

(KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK)

“Housekeeping.”

“Ughhh” from the bed.

(KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK)

“Do you want your room to be cleaned?”

“Mmm … What”

“DO YOU WANT YOUR ROOM CLEANED?”

“Come back later”

“Sir, its nearly one in the afternoon, I have already stopped by several times.”

“Come back at a more reasonable hour.”

Following my rude, cruel awakening by the staff at my hotel, I needed some early morning nutrition to get a jump on the day. I rolled over in my hotel bed and was happy to find a couple of slices of pizza left over from the night before. Chowing down on my breakfast of champions, I washed it down with some nutritious Orange Fanta.

It took me a while to get started on the day, but once I did my first task was to finish up my twice-weekly Chicago Bulls column for the Review. Not wanting to incite the ire of my editor, I made sure to finish the piece before I left for the evening’s games. Experience has taught me that saving a piece for “later” on a Saturday night never works out as one would hope. I wrote it on new Bulls coach Jim Boylan. I felt I had to, after my previous two columns were one praising coach Scott Skiles … only to see him fired a week later, and then one chastising Bulls management for ignoring my advice.

By the time I got to the rink I was once again hungry. I knew I would need all of my energy to ensure that I was at my best to capture all the subtleties and intricacies of the night’s action. I decided a balanced meal would be best, so I chose a hot dog, coke and bucket of popcorn.

Saturday’s afternoon game was the championship of the classic, and featured the two victorious teams from the prior evening’s action: the Northeastern Huskies and the Colgate Raiders. One would not think a game in a small Midwestern city between two East Coast mid-level hockey programs would be well attended - and it was not. There literally could not have been more than two to three hundred people in the 15,000-seat Kohl Center.

Nevertheless, the show must go on. It was a low-scoring affair, with Huskie sophomore and Chicago Steel alum Randy Guzior - pronounced “gooz-ee-or” - striking first with 13:02 left in the first period. It was a particularly bad goal for the Raiders to give up, because two minutes earlier Guzior had gotten a minor penalty for interference.

Following their unsuccessful power play, Colgate let Rob Rassey pass from the defensive zone to Guzior, who had just left the box. Catching the pass behind the ‘Gate defenders, Guzior walked in alone for a breakaway, and beat goalie Mark Dekanich to put the Huskies up by one.

Colgate evened the score in the second when junior forward Tom Riley netted a backhand goal off a pass from defenseman Kevin McNamara. Heading into the third period of the championship, the game was tied. Needless to say, the miniscule number of die-hard hockey fans were sitting on the edges of their seats.

The score remained deadlocked for the first eighteen minutes of the final period, and looked to be headed into overtime. I was excited to watch another shootout, and to see if Dekanich could stop all comers once again. Over the first 58 minutes, each team had chances, but the goalies kept shutting them down. The deadlock was finally broken with just over a minute to play in the game when Huskie forward Ryan Ginard scored the game and Showdown winner.

The goal was eerily reminiscent of another championship winner - Bobby Orr’s score over the St. Louis Blues to win the 1969-70 Stanley Cup. Known in hockey lore simply as “The Goal,” Orr put the puck in the back of the net despite being horizontal at the time… and not in the biblical sense.

While I doubt Ginard’s goal will be remembered for quite as long, it was still extremely impressive. Like Orr, a defender had just tripped him and his skates were off the ice as he ripped his shot home. It was how Superman would score if he wasn’t a hick raised in Kansas.

Despite the loss, Colgate coach Don Vaughn was proud of his team’s weekend performance, and confident about their chances for the remainder of the season. He said they needed to “shore up their defense.” He also praised the play of goalie Dekanich, calling him “one of the best in the country.” The NHL apparently agrees with him, as the Nashville Predators selected Mark in the ‘06 draft.

2007 Badger Hockey Showdown All-Tournament Team

Forwards
Jimmy Russo, Northeastern
Jesse Winchester, Colgate
Ben Street, Wisconsin

Defense
Louis Liotti, Northeastern
Wade Poplawski, Colgate

Goaltender
Brad Thiessen, Northeastern

Most Outstanding Player
Brad Thiessen, Northeastern

  • Note: Despite the high number of already-drafted NHL prospects, none of them made it onto the All-Tournament team. Congratulations from The Chicago Sports Review to those who did.
  • Note 2: I only included the quote at the beginning as a pathetic attempt to intellectualize my inexcusable tardiness in finishing this column.

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Charlie is an aspiring writer and a caddy at Skokie Country Club. Odds are you will hear a lot about him in the years to come, so if you want to be the first kid on the block familiar with his work, click here.

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