Yes, watch both games while you can, because as I found out the hard way last season, ESPN+ takes down the games that are not on "their channel." Our 2023 Frozen Four semifinal vs Northeastern was nowhere to be found, like, a month later. LOL, the NCAA Title Game is still out on Youtube, but I have no desire to watch that one. Robertearle and Timothy A can enjoy that one.
When my nephew was in school at the Oberlin Conservatory in the mid 2010s, my brother asked if I knew or could figure out how to copy or download, etc. the concerts he was involved in that the school would stream. So I did. And then it dawned on me to look into doing similarly with games of various Wisconsin teams. Since then I've kept at it, for "big" games or even games I just want to look at in the days after they were played.
What has been interesting is the different 'transport' mechanisms the different networks and websites use, and how they have evolved (or not) over that time. BTN-Plus makes no effort at all to make things difficult. There are extensions to Google Chrome that can just pull video down off the BTN-Plus web site with no 'tricks' at all. And just about all their games back through 2015 or whatever are still available, and can be easily downloaded and captured.
ESPN is the complete opposite. Over the years, they've changed the 'packetizing' mechanism a number of times to keep ahead of such software. And kind of oddly, for a while they had a different mechanism for streaming something simultaneous to going over the air than they would use for a simple web 'replay. One of the reasons I know they do this Sunday AM replay is that I used it to capture most - but not all, because there was an 'active' switching of the URL you had to direct the software to capture, more-or-less at each commercial break - of the 2021 final vs Northeastern. (As best I know, that doesn't work anymore, BTW) The straight internet replays would 'claim' to be one standard protocol, but underneath wouldn't actually adhere to that protocol, and instead used some private unpublished "codec" (to go into more detail than most would care about).
(To clarify after re-reading, of course I couldn't use the Sunday AM replay to capture the final. I used it to capture the Ohio State semi final, and used other replays later that next week for the Northeastern final. There will be other ESPNU replays this year over the next week or so, you just have to check their schedule to find them.)
At the same time, the most simple answer, a straight 'grab' of the video screen itself, has gotten so much better that I'm just using that this week for the ESPN games. I did that capture of the Colgate game just today.
Grabbing YouTube videos is generally easily done, but can get complicated when the files start to get 'big', particularly if they're in a format you want to covert away from.
