The UMass Minutemen are Hockey East tournament champions for the first time in program history, beating UMass Lowell 1-0 in Saturday night’s conference championship game at the Mullins Center in Amherst.
The lone goal came from Jake Gaudet late in the first period, when he banked in a shot from behind the net off Lowell goalie Henry Welsch.
That Gaudet scored the title-winning goal was fitting -- not just because he is a senior captain of the Minutemen, but because it has been his class that has led the program’s turnaround over the last four years, culminating in the biggest win in program history Saturday night.
When they arrived on campus in 2017, in head coach Greg Carvel’s second season, UMass was coming off an abysmal 5-29-2 campaign and had not had a winning season in a decade.
Gaudet and his current teammates were not the biggest names of that year’s freshman class. That honor went to Cale Makar first and foremost, and then Mario Ferraro and John Leonard after that.
In 2018-19, Makar won the Hobey Baker with one of the best seasons any defenseman has ever had in college hockey, and UMass won the Hockey East regular-season title and made it all the way to the national championship game, where it lost to Minnesota-Duluth.
That team did not win the Hockey East tournament, though, getting upset by Boston College in the semifinals. After the season, Makar and Ferraro both left for the NHL. Leonard joined them a year later after the pandemic-shortened 2019-20 season.
But as it turns out, this team was not just built on a few stars. They -- and especially Makar -- were the catalysts for the turnaround, but their departures did not mark the end of it.
Gaudet and four of his classmates are still there, as are top juniors like leading scorer Bobby Trivigno, defenseman Marc Del Gaizo and goalie Filip Lindberg, who stopped all 16 shots he faced Saturday. Underclassmen Zac Jones, Matthew Kessel and Josh Lopina were three of the team’s top five scorers this season.
The Minutemen finished third in Hockey East in the regular season this year and beat Northeastern and Providence by a combined score of 9-3 in the conference tournament to reach the championship game.
In another fitting twist, it was UMass system rival Lowell they had to beat Saturday night. While the Minutemen and River Hawks don’t have much of a history in big games, as they have rarely both been top teams at the same time, they have long been rivals and long been compared to each other.
It’s a comparison that for much of the last decade was little comparison at all. While UMass dwelled in or near the Hockey East basement, Lowell went to five straight Hockey East title games from 2013-17 and won three of them.
After finishing seventh in the regular season, the River Hawks put together an impressive tournament run to get to Saturday, knocking off the top two seeds in Boston University and Boston College. Now they wait to see if their late-season surge was enough to earn them an at-large berth in the NCAA tournament.
Saturday was about the Minutemen, though. It was about hardware that has evaded them for 27 years since joining Hockey East in 1994, including the only other time they played in the title game -- a heartbreaking triple-overtime loss to Maine in 2004.
Finally, those ghosts have been vanquished. The years of misery have been forgotten. The Minutemen are Hockey East champions.