… Plus a look at this weekend’s match-ups from around the league.

Remember folks, this is just one writer’s opinion. This week’s rankings reflect my WCHA Media Poll ballot. These are obviously very fluid, and I will post new power rankings on a weekly basis.

Without further delay, here are my Week 0 power rankings:

1 — Colorado College
• With the Schwartz bros. leading a deep group of forwards, the Tigers could be the 2011-12 version of last season’s Minnesota Duluth squad.

2 — North Dakota
• They don’t rebuild, they just reload. Aaron Dell might be the best goalie in the conference and while UND is young, they’ll be dangerous by year’s end.

3 — Denver
• Perhaps the best overall team in the conference talent wise, the Pioneers lack a proven goaltender.

4 — Nebraska-Omaha
• The Mavericks are almost entirely made of Blais guys, and the ones that aren’t, know what to expect now. No team works or hits harder.

5 — Minnesota
• Don Lucia needs to win this season or else he’s in jeopardy of being unemployed. To do that, he’ll need his young forwards to put the puck in the net.

6 — Minnesota Duluth
• There’s still plenty of weapons up front in Duluth, but is there enough talent and depth on the blueline to sustain the defending champs?

7 — Wisconsin
• There’s always top-end talent in Madison and perhaps no team is better coached. Can Wisconsin’s get enough goaltending from their freshmen netminders?

8 — Minnesota State
• Don’t sleep on the Mavericks. Yeah, they lost their top three defensemen, but they also return their top three forwards and both goalies.

9 — St. Cloud State
• Guys that underwhelmed in support roles last season will be counted on to lead this season. Can they do it? Mike Lee will keep this group competitive by himself.

10 — Alaska-Anchorage
• The talent is young in Anchorage but it is undeniable. Can Chris Kamal prove the guy towards the end of last season was the real Chris Kamal?

11 — Bemidji State
• The Beavers return their leading scorer, their best defenseman and their goaltender, but what else is there in Bemidji?

12 — Michigan Tech
• Mel Pearson has the Huskies on the right track but it will probably be a year or two before this team is ready to push for home ice.

That said, here is a look at this weekend’s match-ups from around the league and some random jottings that come to mind about each series:

Minnesota State at RPI
• The Mavericks are tested immediately with a road series against a ranked opponent. MSU head coach Troy Jutting said in a perfect world, his young forwards wouldn’t be so stiffly tested early in the season. On the other hand, he said, it should be good for his team in the long run. If MSU can get a win in Troy, N.Y. this weekend, it would also go a long ways towards helping their Pairwise Ranking.

American International at Michigan Tech
• The Pearson era begins with a couple of very winnable games at MacInnes. Win twice this weekend and the Huskies have half of last year’s win total before conference play even begins.

Bemidji State at Miami
• A tough task for the Beavers to open the season, but if you’re going to win in Oxford, early in the season is the time to do it. At the very least, BSU will get a see how they measure up against one of the nation’s best teams in one of the nation’s toughest arenas to play in.

Notre Dame at Minnesota Duluth
In perhaps the series of the weekend, the defending champs open against this season’s top-ranked team. It’s sure to be an emotional weekend at AMSOIL, as the ‘Dogs will unveil their championship banner before Friday’s game. One would think that should be good for at least one win.

Northern Michigan at Wisconsin
The youthful Badgers will open at home — a fact sure to help a Wisconsin team with 20 underclassmen on the roster. The Kohl Center is as big a home ice advantage as there is in the country, so playing in front of the Cardinal and White should help Wisconsin’s kids get acclimated early.

Sacred Heart at Minnesota
The Golden Gophers must get a couple of wins to help ease the pressure on head coach Don Lucia. In a season where fans expect results or walking papers, losing at home to the Pioneers would not be a good way to start.

Nebraska-Omaha hosts Mutual of Omaha Stampede
The red Mavericks should have no trouble winning twice this weekend. With games against Mercyhurst and either Robert Morris or Colgate, at least that what fans in Omaha should be thinking.

North Dakota hosts the Ice Breaker
The Fighting Sioux open with a game they should win against Air Force before a great second game match-up against either Boston College or Michigan State. UND is inexperienced up front, so scoring early on Dell and/or Eidsness would certainly help the Eagles or Spartans chances of scoring a tournament victory.

Alaska-Anchorage hosts St. Cloud State, Fairbanks, Clarkson at Kendall Classic
UAA opens with Clarkson before hosting conference foe SCSU in a nonconference game. If Anchorage can win twice, it would go a long ways towards giving an already confident team even more confidence. SCSU begins with a bunch of early season road games, and head coach Bob Motzko says its as good a time as any to spend time in Alaska. A couple losses this weekend may change his tune.

As always, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@CHNDanMyers) for the latest news and notes (plus random thoughts and musings) about the WCHA. See you at the rink!

Parker (l.) and York celebrate the last two NCAA championships.

Anyone who has followed college hockey for years know how entwined Boston University coach Jack Parker is to Boston College coach Jerry York. It’s not just because they are the respective coaches now of two arch rivals. It goes way back and way deeper.

There was no better person to sum this up than our friend and Boston Herald writer John Connolly, in a recent piece for the Herald. It’s a must read. You should check it out.

The article was written because today, the pair are being enshrined, together, in the New England Sports Museum Hall of Fame. It’s only fitting, as the bond continues.

Both Boston-area natives, the same age, but from two different towns, went to two different rival colleges — yet here they, having been responsible for winning the last two NCAA championships. Each one of those was the third for each coach. They flip flop as to who has the most wins — they are 1-2 among active coaches, each with over 800 — and they show no signs of slowing down as they chase Ron Mason’s record of 924.

This chart shows the current leaders (it doesn’t yet include this past season).

I am proud to say I cover hockey. However, I am a fan of the sport first.

I’ve been a UMD season-ticket holder since 2003. I remember sitting in front of the television and yelling to the point of nearly losing my voice as the Bulldogs skated to the 2004 Frozen Four, and then took a two-goal lead in the national semifinal against Denver.

As you are probably aware, not much has gone right for UMD since. They were on their way to a win over St. Cloud State in the first round of the 2007 playoffs, but then Bobby Goepfert stood on his head for four overtimes over two nights. His team was pretty thoroughly outplayed, but part of playing the game is scoring goals, and UMD just couldn’t on those nights. St. Cloud won the series, and UMD was sent to the golf course prematurely, only to find when they got there that the two best players on that 2006-2007 team (Matt Niskanen and Mason Raymond) had signed pro contracts.

Last year’s team was strong defensively, but couldn’t score goals. MacGregor Sharp led the team with 17 points. Andrew Carroll led in goals with eight. It doomed them to an eighth-place finish and a two-game playoff loss to Denver.

With how the regular-season ended, no one saw this coming. The Bulldogs went 0-3-2 down the stretch, with two straight losses to Alaska-Anchorage providing a painful farewell for seven UMD seniors. In retrospect, one of the worst home weekends in a long time may have been a blessing in disguise. UMD deserved to lose those games, and they knew it. Instead of moping or resigning themselves to a one-and-done playoff fate, this Bulldog team used the adversity as a coming-together point.

Since they didn’t know they had to fly to Colorado Springs until the close of play Saturday, they had to set up a rather arduous travel schedule. Fly to Minneapolis and then Denver Wednesday evening, and bus from Denver to Colorado Springs. It was early Thursday morning before they arrived. Instead of being tired after such a difficult late-season trip, UMD looked fresh and prepared Friday. A 4-1 win Friday was followed by a 3-1 triumph Saturday.

By now, you know full well what happened over the weekend in St. Paul. It was the kind of history that you don’t get to see every year, and it was a performance for the ages. In a way, it was fitting, because this team made a commitment to themselves after that Anchorage series, and they’ve played near-perfect hockey since.

The most amazing statistic is that they have yet to trail in the playoffs. In fact, the only time any UMD playoff game this year has been tied has been 0-0. Once UMD has taken the lead, they’ve held it. You can credit Alex Stalock all you want, but the 18 guys in front of him deserve their props, too.

One of my worries about UMD going to Colorado College is that they struggled (3-5-3) on the big sheet during the regular season. They allowed too many goals in most of those games, including four in one at Anchorage, six at St. Cloud State, and five at Minnesota. The defense took a few hits in those games, but they have protected Stalock wondrously in the first five playoff games.

Princeton brings speed, skill, and goaltending to the table Friday night. UMD can’t be looking forward to a potential rematch Saturday with Denver (neither can Denver, for that matter, or it could be Miami vs Princeton in front of 550 friends and family at Mariucci). But they haven’t looked forward to anything yet. They’ve focused on the task at hand, even on Saturday night in the WCHA Final Five championship, when they led 3-0, fans were ready to party, and it would have been easy to lapse. Instead of giving up a lame goal late in the game, UMD only let Denver attempt six shots the whole period (five were blocked).

No matter what, the thousands of Minnesotans who will show up at Mariucci Arena Friday night need to appreciate what this UMD team has done. They not only made history, but they’ve shown that from adversity can come special achievements.

That this group of kids banded together and stormed into the NCAA Tournament is the stuff of stories 20 years from now. Expectations are growing in Duluth, but let’s hope the fans also bring a sense of perspective to the rink Friday. The ride this team has taken us on the last two weeks is one that won’t be forgotten anytime soon, and we thank you for it.

ST. PAUL – There are only four teams left at the 2009 WCHA Final Five. Of them, one of them (Wisconsin) knows they have to win the tournament and “steal” the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

Two (North Dakota and Denver) could fall flat on their faces in St. Paul, and still make the field safely. Such is life when you’ve finished first and second, respectively, in the regular-season standings of one of the toughest conferences in the country.

The other (Minnesota-Duluth) can make the NCAAs without winning another game, but only if nothing else goofy happens when the puck is dropped on other conference tournaments later Friday. Their safest path to the icy version of the Big Dance is to win one more game, whether it be Friday in the semifinals or Saturday in the finals (remember, the WCHA does play a third-place game).

To make things more interesting, the team eliminated Thursday night (Minnesota) can still make the NCAAs, but they must sit at home and watch the events of the weekend unfold first. If they can hold on to 14th position in the Pairwise, and no upsets occur in any league tournaments, the Gophers can still make the field. It’s going to be about 34 more hours, however, before they know which “sticks” they’ll be getting out next: hockey, or golf.

A depleted Denver team battles Wisconsin in the semifinals, while UMD takes on red-hot top-seed North Dakota.

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.

Donovan McNabb may not have known that a football game could end in a tie, but at least there’s a legitimate reason for his ignorance. Is there anyone out there who honestly believes that a football game should be allowed to end in a tie?

When it comes to hockey, it seems that we are now being asked by the powers that be to believe that premise as well. The NHL has banished the tie for the last four seasons now, and this year the CCHA became the first league to refuse the concept that two teams could be evenly matched.

In the four major North American sports, hockey is really the only one in which ties can really be deemed acceptable. Basketball and football both feature different ways to score different multiples of points, meaning that ties can usually be broken pretty quickly in an overtime period. The NFL still allows ties to occur, but they’re pretty rare (and fixing that issue is a column for another time and another site). Baseball scores things one at a time, but there’s no clock, so teams can just play until there’s a winner. Sometimes it takes all night, but that’s the way the sport evolved.

Hockey has the combination of a clock and a one-at-a-time scoring scheme, which is the perfect combination to allow for teams to finish the game without determining a winner and loser. As we’ve seen during the playoffs, simply continuing until finding a winning goal can sometimes take forever. That’s why the NHL and the CCHA have resorted to shootouts in their quest to abolish the tie – it ends the game faster than more regulation play.

But why this crusade against the tie? I have heard it said that fans simply don’t like ties, that people expect a winner to come out of every game. I have also heard it said that the leagues want to discourage teams from playing tentative hockey in overtime to avoid losing a guaranteed point in search of a second one (which brought us the silly “overtime loss” category in the NHL). The latter has at least some merit to it, but the former seems pretty ridiculous.

Is a tie the most satisfying result possible? Of course not. Both teams go home with less than they could have. Neither gets the satisfaction of a win, but neither takes the sting of a loss. And yet, at the same time, a tie can be a satisfying or a highly disappointing result. The underdog team that comes in and fights tooth and nail with the powerhouse and earns a tie can walk away with a sense of accomplishment. The team that was down 3-0 during the second intermission and comes back to tie can engender the same feeling. The “satisfying tie.” The reverse – the powerhouse that ties an underdog and the team that blows the big lead – the “disappointing tie.” And then, of course, you have the “sister kissers,” those games that are just evenly matched throughout.

Want to encourage the teams to go all out during the overtime period? Set up a points system that rewards wins more and provides an opportunity cost for a tie. Major League Soccer, along with most international soccer leagues, does just that already. A win is worth three points, and a tie is worth one. If you sit back and wait for the tie, you lose a chance at two additional points, but if you push for the win and give up the goal, you’ve only lost one.

Instead, the NHL decided to create a system that rewards the losing team in overtime with a point – the only major sport where you can lose the game and still advance your cause.

Now, all of this would be relatively moot if the shootout were an acceptable derivation of the game as a whole so as to be a worthy substitute, but the idea of one shooter taking on one goaltender is such a microcosm of the game of hockey as to render it generally unacceptable for determining the winner of a team sport.

Penalty shots are exciting when they take place during the course of the game, and often times their success or failure does determine the outcome of the game. Shootouts take far too many important elements out of consideration when determining a winner – passing, physical play, and team defense are rendered completely useless.

Then there’s the smell test. If shootouts were truly an acceptable method for determining a winner of a hockey game, there’s no reason they wouldn’t use them in the playoffs as well. Since there really can’t be ties in the post-season, why waste everyone’s time by playing long into the night to find a winner?

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just too much of a traditionalist and I need to just embrace the shootout – after all, it’s becoming more and more popular in various leagues.

Yes, I have broadcasted 128 Minnesota-Duluth men’s hockey games.

Yes, I am continuing to support the program as a season-ticket holder.

Yes, I despise the Minnesota Gophers with every fiber of my being.

However, I am not an idiot. My respect for Don Lucia’s work as a college hockey coach is as high as it gets. Evidence can be found here and here.

The fact that he is a great coach and a wonderful ambassador for the sport doesn’t change the fact that he is capable of being dead wrong.

Evidence of that can be found here.

“I have never discouraged or encouraged [playing football], but that may change now in light of what happened to Zach (Budish, Gopher hockey recruit who suffered a torn ACL playing football) and what happened to Garrett, too,” said Lucia, who also watched recruit Garrett Smaagaard of Eden Prairie miss his senior year of hockey after tearing his ACL in the 2000 Prep Bowl.

Budish’s injury and Lucia’s stance underscore a growing conflict between the two sports. Overlapping schedules, competition for varsity spots and the growing trend of specialization have the relationship between football and hockey, as Hill-Murray activities director and hockey coach Bill Lechner said, “at an uncertain point.”

Kim Nelson of Edina and Vince Conway of Hill-Murray, who coach football at schools where hockey is king, worry that Budish’s injury might make hockey players — particularly elite-level players — reconsider playing football.

Their concerns have merit. Just weeks after Budish’s injury, Lucia received a verbal commitment from an athlete who played both football and hockey.

“We had a talk,” Lucia said. “I said, ‘It’s time to be a hockey player, not a football player.’ He agreed and he’s not going to play football next year.”

I’m all for coaches advising their recruits. I’m not all for coaches telling their recruits not to play football. High school is a time for enjoyment, a time for hanging out with friends, and a not a time to be specializing in one sport over anything else.

To me, coaches who try to steer their recruits to a single sport are afraid. They’re afraid that the kid will start to like a different sport and want to play that instead.

Such fears didn’t overcome anyone in the Minnesota-Duluth program after Matt Niskanen committed there in 2004. Niskanen was a three-sport athlete in high school, playing hockey for the co-op Virginia/Mountain Iron-Buhl program, and playing football and baseball for Mountain Iron-Buhl. He continued to play football and baseball in his senior year, and was a top-notch player in all three sports.

Listen, I’m not trying to hold up Niskanen as some sort of evidence to a greater rule. And I’m not trying to make Scott Sandelin out to be automatically smarter or a better coach than Lucia because he didn’t try to keep Niskanen from playing those sports in his senior year.

But if you ask Niskanen, and I have, the fact that he played all three sports made him a better hockey player and a better person. And you can’t argue with the outcome in either realm. Not only is he one of the better young defensemen in the NHL, but he’s also one of the nicest people you could ever meet, and he truly hasn’t forgotten his roots.

And Lucia is not alone. Around the country, there are coaches trying to dissuade their kids from playing other sports as they grow older. For every Don Lucia, there is a college football coach practically begging his recruits to stop playing hockey or basketball or baseball. And there are high school coaches who go so far as to demand their star players not play any other sport.

These things happen. And they need to stop.

We can’t be in such a hurry to get kids through the developmental stages of sports that we don’t allow them to be kids. Yes, there will be kids like Aaron Ness, a Gophers freshman defenseman who accelerated his high-school education so he could graduate and join the Minnesota program as quickly as possible. But Ness didn’t do that because Lucia told him to. He did it because he wanted to.

And that’s how this should be done. Not with pressure, threats, or even subtle requests from college coaches. If a high-school kid wants to play three sports and star in all three, that should be his decision and no one else’s.

Yes, there is risk.

But there’s also risk in letting that same kid drive to school every day. You don’t see coaches banning their players from driving, do you?

Silly? Absolutely. So is a hockey coach worrying about a potential star recruit getting hurt while playing football, or any other sport.

I’ve always been pleased as punch with the fact that the NCAA doesn’t incorporate polls into the selection process for the NCAA Hockey Tournament.

Of course, it means that the polls are nothing but discussion fodder. But that’s a good thing. Polls should never be more than that. The opinions of human beings should mean nothing when you’re determining who the best hockey teams are. Same goes for football, basketball, baseball, tennis, volleyball, bowling, and any other sport.

We have tournaments and postseasons so we can decide these types of important things on the field of play.

This week, college hockey pollsters are faced with an interesting, difficult, and nearly-impossible dynamic when it comes to WCHA teams (and others, mind you, but I’m going to focus for a moment on the WCHA).

Minnesota State is now 8-5-3. They have impressive wins over Colorado College and North Dakota, but lost twice over the weekend to St. Cloud State, and they also have a loss and a tie against Minnesota.

St. Cloud State sits at 10-6, just swept MSU, but has lost twice to Minnesota-Duluth by matching 5-1 scores.

UMD is unbeaten in their last five. The Bulldogs, now 7-4-5 on the season, chased Colorado College star goalie Richard Bachman with a five-goal second period explosion Saturday. The 7-4 win follows a three-point weekend against North Dakota and a second four-goal win over St. Cloud State.

Who gets ranked where?

Thankfully, it doesn’t really matter. These three teams settle their differences and decide their rankings with their play on the ice. In January, various sites will start to publish their guesses on what the PWR looks like. CHN has already started publishing the KRACH ratings (waiting until everyone has lost one game).

The only day the PWR matters is on Selection Sunday, but it’s always interesting to watch the ebb and flow over the course of the season’s second half. While there are always quirks with logic involved, they aren’t nearly as bad as the quirks with logic that are involved in the polls.

Of course, it’s always easier to except the quirks when you realize the polls don’t matter one lick. It’s nothing but blog and message board fodder to keep us interested until another full slate of games on Friday night.

You may remember former Maine goaltender Ben Bishop, who led the Black Bears to back-to-back Frozen Fours in 2006 and 2007.

Well, thanks to — of all people — vice-presidental candidate Sarah Palin, Bishop made his NHL debut on Friday night, playing for his hometown St. Louis Blues against the Los Angeles Kings. What did the Alaska governor have to do with all this?

Well, regular Blues starting netminder Manny Legace suffered a hip injury after slipping on a red carpet on the ice, which was in place for Palin to drop the ceremonial first puck. No word as to whether this will affect Bishop’s (or Legace’s) vote in a couple of weeks.

Two other observations around college hockey from Friday night:

— The CCHA has only had 10 league games so far, but 6 out of its 12 teams have already experienced a game-deciding shootout — a feature that the league introduced to settle ties this season. On Friday, Western Michigan earned an extra point against Ferris State, while Michigan State earned an extra point against Northern Michigan.

— After somewhat impressively playing two close games at Colorado College two weeks ago, Alabama-Huntsville was back on the ice… for a 13-0 drubbing of Tennessee in an exhibition game. Some fun facts: the Chargers outshot the Volunteers 66-8, including 24-0 in the third period. 15 of the 18 skaters for UAH recorded at least one point, with 9 different players scoring at least one goal. Obviously there was a significant talent gap.

But a little research finds the possible real reason for the Chargers running up the score: way back in 1979, UAH lost its very first home game… to Tennessee.