Couple of lead in items- first and foremost- it was my first year at Michigan, but I've been an avid hockey fan and player- as much as one could be in Idaho. Second- this was Michigan's first trip to the tournemant in a LOOONG time. I understand they were close the year before, but it was a heck of a season. Third- with the more lively crowd that season, chants were getting to be a good thing. It was also the year that a few fans started the c-ya chant after the Duke BB game on Dec 8, 1990. So the whole fan base was paying a lot more attention.
On the other hand, it still wasn't a full arena. I was on the very edge of the student section, right over the blue line
When Sparty came to town, their fans were RIGHT next to me. Nice people, BTW. So it wasn't totally like it is now.
And in that day, the tournament first two rounds were on campus, best 2 of 3. We did good enough to host Cornell in the first round.
Cornell fans seem to have been at it for some time, as they brought a HUGE section of people, filling up the upper part of the north end, and a lot of them students. And they made a LOT of noise all weekend. The "your mom called- you suck", the "your not a vacuum, your a black hole, etc" cheers. Lots of stuff that we do now in the middle of the game. We absorbed it all. They were very cool, and just great supporters of Cornell Hockey, and I personally have no problem copying that, noting how much fun they had.
I do think that our fans did a good job of matching them, it didn't seem like some kind of bad blood kind of weekend between the fans at all. Fun as heck.
Tense weekend, though- (I had to look up the scores)- Cornell won Friday's game in OT 5-4, but we won Saturday 6-4 and Sunday 9-3 to head to Boston the following week (where they crushed us in two).
That '90-'91 season was a turning point in many ways- what happened on the ice AND what happened in the stands. Good memories. Partially thanks do Duke for C-ya, and much thanks to Cornell, Michgan fans added onto the Sieve chant, added on to all of the chants, and made some new ones. I *think* we did "goalie-sive" repeated, for sure did the "goalie, goalie, goalie- sieve, sieve" for really fun games, and "ugly goalie/"handsome goalie".
