Sad news comes to us today out of South Bend, where Notre Dame play-by-play man Mike Lockert passed away in his sleep this morning.

Mike was one of those people who was just thrilled to be working in and covering the game. He talked last year in Denver at the Frozen Four about how much he enjoyed college hockey, after having spent time in the past with other major sports, so he brought an interesting perspective. It was fun to see how someone relatively new to the game had come to see and appreciate the things we have enjoyed about it. His enthusiasm for the game and Irish hockey was infectious. You couldn’t help but smile being around him or listening to him call a game.

I remember talking to him after the championship game, and how disappointed he was at Notre Dame’s loss. And saying to him that the way things are going, he’ll get more chances to call a national championship — and might be right back here again next year. I never would have thought this would have happened.

So it is with much sadness that we at CHN remember Mike today and ask you to keep his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers.

Someone sent me a link, tipping me off to a press release from a company in Kansas City that does architectural work for athletic arenas. Here is the link:

http://www.crawfordarch.com/pdfs/Penn_State_Hockey_Study.pdf

Don’t bother clicking, it doesn’t work anymore.

It was a press release, saying that the company had been commissioned to do a study, with the purpose of building a 6,000 seat ice hockey arena for Penn State’s campus. The release also specifically said the arena’s purpose was to house a Division I men’s and women’s team.

As you probably know, the idea of Penn State — a seven-time champion at the club level, and a team that packs its tiny arena — becoming a full-fledged Division I program has been dreamed about for a long time. The idea of a school like that starting a program is a nice feather in the cap for college hockey. It’s also something many people fear, since it could start the wheels in motion for a Big Ten Hockey Conference to form, which would have widespread ramifications, most of them negative, in many people’s opinion.

In any case, it would be big news.

So I made some calls. I called Penn State’s athletic department. I spoke to the athletic director’s office, and a spokesperson in the office of athletic communications. They never heard of the release.

They sent me to their facilities person, Amy Mann. She never heard of it.  She said that, if there was such a plan in the works, she definitely would have heard of it.

So I e-mailed the club coach. No response.  I called the old club coach, Joe Battista, who now runs the Nittany Lion Club. No response.

So I called the name of the person on the press release.  She said she was just someone the architecture company hired to do some marketing. She gave me the number of someone at the company, David Miller.  I called him. He didn’t answer. I left a message asking about the release, and wondering what the status and nature of the project was. No response.

This was all around early afternoon. By 3 p.m. (ET) the press release link no longer worked. Still no return calls from anyone.

We, however, have grabbed the Google cache version of the release, and you can view it here.

Dare I speculate on what happened here?

It reminds of the time, oh, about seven years ago or so. There was an ad in The Hockey News saying Hofstra University was looking for a men’s hockey coach for its “soon-to-be” Division I program. There was a whole lot of chicanery and wishful thinking involved with that one.

My guess is, this was a combination of the club program trying to push the ball forward, and the architectural company trying to embellish reality.

Penn State screwed up when it built the Bryce Jordan Center, and didn’t put ice making facilities in it. That was a dozen years ago. At this point, don’t expect D-I hockey at Penn State any time soon.

UPDATE: A local State College, Pa., paper was able to get someone at the university’s physical plant to admit that a “what if” study was done. The guy indicates that they’ve done a number of these studies over the years. So the bottom line is, it appears that people at the architecture firm severely jumped the gun with the release — embellishing reality a bit, as we first suggested — and when people started sniffing around, they pulled the release (or were ordered to).

This is great.

Former Alaska-Anchorage forward Justin Bourne is writing a blog now at The Hockey News web site. If his first entry is any indication, this guy has a great future.

Please check it out. I laughed, I cried, I cringed. It was funny, poignant, insightful, well-written. I can’t do it justice describing it. Just go read it.

Adam had an interesting post about hits from behind.

He mentioned some comments over the weekend by Alaska-Anchorage head coach Dave Shyiak, who was peeved over a major penalty issued to one of his players.

While I understand Shyiak’s frustration, and I agree that the NCAA mandate is kind of dumb, I don’t share his take that it’s “ruining the game”. In fact, I think we have a problem in that we aren’t getting enough of these major penalties called.

Mat Robinson clearly didn’t mean to hit Nico Sacchetti from behind. Sacchetti turned his back at the last second, and Robinson had already committed to what would have been a clean shoulder-to-shoulder check. Sacchetti wasn’t necessarily turning to draw a five-minute major, but those last-second turns sure do seem to happen a lot these days.

To me, the problem is twofold.

For starters, too many officials are finding a way around the five-minute major mandate. Instead of labeling obvious hits from behind as such, they call minor penalties for boarding, cross-checking, charging, elbowing, or whatever. Until all officials are following the mandate at all times, instead of almost applying it when they feel like it, there is no reason to continue with the mandate. If the problem is that “five and a game misconduct” is too much, how about just assessing a five-minute major and not taking the offending player out of the game?

The other problem is that we are seeing a ton of these last-second turns. I can’t imagine players are intentionally trying to take hits in the back so they can fall into the boards and risk a serious injury. Nobody is that stupid. However, how can you tell Mat Robinson not to hit Nico Sacchetti because the latter turns his back at the last second? It makes absolutely no sense, if for no other reason than the fact that it’s probably physically impossible to pull up in many of these situations.

I’m all for eliminating hits from behind in our game. I think it’s an important component toward restoring respect for the game from all who play it. But I think we need to take a serious look at how it’s being done, and realize that it’s not working the way anyone intended.

Did you see Anchorage coach Dave Shyiak’s comments after last night’s game? Hmmm…. Shyiak was upset about a hit from behind call that created a 5-on-3 and Minnesota’s game-winning goal.

“Too many players are turning their backs. Hitting is part of the game. I think [the checking from behind call] is ruining the game,” Shyiak said. “As coaches we gotta make up our minds. Do we want to allow hitting? Otherwise we should just the say no checking and play women’s hockey. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”

Ruining the game? I wouldn’t go that far. In fact, I think the hit from behind call is very important. However, I happen to agree with him about that call. It was a lousy call. It was a borderline 2-minute penalty at best, and in no way deserved a 5-plus-game DQ.

So maybe it was just Shyiak’s emotions getting the better of him, but the hit from behind call is important — but we need to get it right.

The ironic thing is, this comes in the WCHA, where things are relatively laissez-faire. The league took a couple of extra years than the other leagues to install the officiating mandate to crack down on obstruction. And the league has seen more flat out fights — or something closely resembling them — this year than probably the rest of the leagues combined. And the WCHA office does very little about it, choosing to allow a certain level of this stuff without making fighting Game DQ calls, and without suspensions. The general policy of the WCHA is to allow the teams to suspend players before they take any action, and usually the league just goes along with it.

So the irony is clear there, and I think the WCHA officials should be more pro-active, not less. Though, again, in this particular case, Shyiak had a right to be upset.