Frozen Four 2013: Yale rides goalie Malcolm to national title

PITTSBURGH -- Yale head coach Keith Allain said that in coming to coach at his alma mater, he wanted to prove that you can get the best education in the world and still compete at the highest level of Division I athletics. His vision came to fruition on Saturday night, as his Yale Bulldogs won their first national championship against their ECAC rivals, the Quinnipiac Bobcats, by a final of 4-0.

The game was scoreless until the waning seconds of the second period, when Clinton Bourbonais tipped a puck through the five hole of QU goalie Eric Hartzell. Goals would follow in the third period from Charles Orzetti, Andrew Miller and Pittsburgh native Jesse Root as the Bulldogs took all the momentum and snowballed.

PITTSBURGH -- What a first period of hockey. The Yale Bulldogs and Quinnipiac Bobcats are scoreless after 20 minutes in the national championship game after putting together a period that had just a little bit of everything.

You can certainly tell that these rivals have a particular disdain for one another, with physical play sprinkled throughout the first period. One hit in particular sent Quinnipiac defenseman Zach Tolkinen briefly to the locker room after he was buried into the end boards, but Tolkinen came back to the bench after about five minutes.

PITTSBURGH -- We’re just about 75 minutes away from the NCAA men’s national championship game between the Quinnipiac Bobcats and Yale Bulldogs, which will air on ESPN at 7 p.m. ET Saturday evening. Let’s take a look at the lines for these two ECAC rivals.

Matthew Peca - Connor Jones - Kellen Jones

Clay Harvey - Jeremy Langlois - Travis St. Denis

Bryce Van Brabant - Ben Arnt - Jordan Samuels-Thomas

Kevin Bui - Cory Hibbeler - Russell Goodman

PITTSBURGH -- There will be a first-time champion crowned in college hockey Saturday evening when the Quinnipiac Bobcats take on in-state and ECAC-rival Yale in the final of the 2013 Frozen Four.

In a lot of ways it’s an absolutely shocking matchup for the national championship game, but in a lot of ways it’s also completely fitting. It may not be Michigan vs. Boston College, but Quinnipiac has been the No. 1 team for nearly the entire second half of the season, and Yale knocked off two perennial powerhouses in Minnesota and North Dakota and the Vegas-favored UMass-Lowell River Hawks to get to the title game. Not only did they upset all three teams, but they made it look easy in the process.

When you’re a freshman at Quinnipiac University, you’re forced to take a seminar called “QU 101” during your first semester. I found it to be a tiring exercise where we sat around and talked about our “identity” and “community” and “individuality” and other things college freshmen really couldn’t care less about, but our otherwise-useless brick of a textbook was good for one thing: It introduced us to a 2003 op-ed written by Jeremy Kutner of the Yale Daily News.

A brief excerpt:

On Saturday night, two in-state rivals will battle to take home the state of Connecticut’s first ever NCAA hockey championship.

Yale and Quinnipiac, both out of the Nutmeg State and the ECAC, will try to take home the NCAA title in Pittsburgh this evening. The two teams got here with victories on Thursday in the Frozen Four semifinals. Despite the fact that they went to overtime, the Bulldogs were largely the better team for most of their semifinal game against the UMass-Lowell Riverhawks, outshooting Lowell 48-17. Andrew Miller scored at 6:59 of overtime to give Yale the win.