Dartmouth men’s hockey made program history over the weekend, winning its first-ever ECAC Hockey Championship and earning a bid to the NCAA men’s hockey tournament for the first time since 1980.
The Big Green (23-7-4, 13-5-4) will face Wisconsin in the Worcester Regional on Thursday at 5 p.m. The Big Green and Badgers have never faced each other.
Wisconsin (21-12-2, 14-10-0) finished in fourth place in the Big 10 in the regular season.
The other two teams in the Worcester Regional are Michigan State, the tournament’s No. 3 overall seed, and UConn from Hockey East. The games are being played at the DCU Center.
Winning the conference tournament appears to have helped keep the Big Green closer to home for the regional round compared to the other two ECAC teams that qualified.
Cornell, the other Ivy League school to make the tournament, will play Denver in the Loveland Regional, in what will essentially be a home game for the Pioneers in Colorado.
And Quinnipiac, which finished the regular season in first place in the ECAC but lost in the conference quarterfinals, is headed to the Sioux Falls Regional to face Providence in South Dakota.
In addition to Michigan State, the other top overall seeds in the tournament are Michigan, North Dakota and Western Michigan, last season’s national champion.
The Big Green’s conference championship came on Saturday afternoon with a 2-1 overtime victory over Princeton at Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, N.Y.
Tim Busconi scored the winner at 11:18 of overtime, picking up a failed Princeton clearance attempt at the blue line before ripping a wrist shot through a screen that found the back of the net. It was Busconi’s first career game-winning goal.
Hayden Stavroff had given the Big Green a 1-0 lead at 12:45 of the first period on the power play, burying his nation-leading 29th goal of the year off a feed from CJ Foley. Princeton tied it 8:46 into the third, sending the title game to overtime.
Goaltender Emmett Croteau was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player after stopping 25 of 26 shots. Over the weekend in Lake Placid, he posted a .982 save percentage and a 0.46 goals-against average. Stavroff, Foley and Busconi joined Croteau on the All-Tournament Team.
Dartmouth, who finished in third place in the regular season, dominated the faceoff circle, winning nearly 61% of draws. Nathan Morin and Hank Cleaves each won 12.
The ECAC tournament dates to 1962, with Cornell holding the record for most championships at 24, followed by Harvard with 11. No other program in the league’s history has won more than seven tournament trophies.
Dartmouth, which had reached the championship game in both 1979 and 1980 without winning the title, can now add its name to that list.
The championship came one night after the Big Green rolled past Clarkson 4-0 in the semifinals, with Croteau turning aside 31 shots for his 14th win of the season. Morin, Colin Grable, Jack Silverberg and Alex Krause each scored, and Dartmouth’s penalty kill went 5-for-5, including a two-man advantage kill in the first period.
The victories gave Dartmouth its 23rd win of the season, a program record, and secured the automatic NCAA Tournament bid. It is the first time the Big Green have reached the national tournament since 1980, when Dartmouth advanced to its second consecutive Frozen Four.