Quinnipiac, Yale meet for NCAA title

Associated Press

PITTSBURGH

The home rinks for Quinnipiac and Yale lay less than 10 miles apart, linked by a small stretch of Connecticut highway.

It might as well be a chasm.

The two schools who will meet for the NCAA hockey championship today took very different paths to the brink of history.

Yale is the oldest college hockey program in the country. The Bulldogs hosted their first game in 1896 — more than three decades before Quinnipiac was even founded — and play at 58-year-old Ingalls Rink, dubbed “The Yale Whale.” The players answer questions about how they balance academics and athletics at one of the nation’s most demanding universities and what their non-hockey future holds.

The questions fielded by the Bobcats are different, ranging from how to pronounce the school’s mouthful of a name to if they’d even heard of Quinnipiac before coach Rand Pecknold called offering a chance at finishing the job he started when he took the post 19 years ago. The Bobcats didn’t even join Division I until 1998. But they play in sparkling High Point Solutions Arena, a $52-million palace that served as a shot across the bow to the rest of the teams in the ECAC that Quinnipiac is serious about turning into a national power.

Mission accomplished.

The bruising, explosive Bobcats (30-7-5) are the top seed while Yale (21-12-3) is the scrappy underdog searching to fill a trophy case that’s largely empty — especially for a team that’s been playing since Grover Cleveland was president.

Yet for all their confidence after rolling over Yale in each of the three previous meetings this season by a combined score of 13-3, the Bobcats insist they are taking nothing for granted.

“The Yale team that we’re going to face is completely different than the team we played earlier in the year,” forward Jordan Thomas-Samuels said. “They’re clicking on all cylinders at the right time, from goaltending to defense and offense. So I think our record against them doesn’t matter.”

Pecknold says his club was “lucky” to beat the Bulldogs 3-0 three weeks ago in the third-place game of the ECAC tournament. Both teams were coming off emotionally draining losses in the league semifinals and with nothing to play for, the hockey wasn’t compelling.

“I don’t think there was much life for either team,” Yale coach Keith Allain said.