North Dakota's All-Time Winning Percentage In The NCAA Tourney is .702, Best Of All Schools

Chris Porter's game-winning goal in the Western Regional final and the ensuing celebration. I didn't count the number of icings the Gophers took in the extra session, but I believe it was five and at least three or four in rapid order. (It's tough to count on your fingers and nervously drink beer at the same time.) Why were the Sioux handily taking the play to the Gophers with the season on the line?

From the Strib:

"They might have had a little more left in the bag than we did," Gophers assistant captain Alex Goligoski said.

Later in the same story:

Lucia said the strong play of the line of Porter, Chris VandeVelde and Matt Watkins was the difference in the game. The line outplayed the Gophers' line of Blake Wheeler, Ben Gordon and Jay Barriball to the point where Lucia had to make a change.

So the Gophers were outconditioned (if that's a word) and their second line was outplayed? Interesting.

You wouldn't know it from watching the Fox Sport North "Gophers Live" post-game show. As Dan Barrerio pointed out, they rolled out the excuse machine. It was pitiful. You know the homerism has run rampant when Jeff Dubay becomes the voice of reason when it comes to Gopher hockey.

So what now for FSN? Maybe they can pretend Sunday's game never happened and that Blake Wheeler got his lunch handed to him by a blue-collar line. FSN can run a continious loop of his shelf-life-of-seven-days WCHA Final Five-clinching goal and continue to ignore the other Division I hockey programs in the area.

The Gopher hockey faithful only have seven months until they can once again tell the rest of us how great their freshmen are. And they have less than ten months to break out their "fatigued from World Juniors" excuse.

And RandBall summarized the 2006-07 Gopher hockey team the best:

"Hey, but they played hard at least most of the time."