Re: Quinnipiac Bobcats '12-'13 Post Season - The view from the top...
Bob Ryan wrote this in the Boston Globe today (the whole article can be found at the Globe website).
The eyes and ears of millions will be trained on the Georgia Dome Monday night, when Louisville and Michigan meet for the NCAA men’s basketball championship.
But to a feisty slice of the collegiate sports fandom, all that basketball nonsense is a foolish exercise that is diverting America’s attention from a far more relevant matter, which is, of course, the Frozen Four that will commence Thursday night in Pittsburgh.
And what a Frozen Four it is. If there’s anything that speaks to the almost amusing nature of the Frozen Four, as opposed to the Final Four, it is the identity of the four schools comprising the 2013 Frozen Four: UMass-Lowell, Quinnipiac, Yale, and St. Cloud State.
It’s the anti-Final Four!
And I love it.
Never mind the fact that there are three schools from New England, and the next time there will be three schools from New England in the Final Four — men or women’s — is the Twelfth of Never. But there are two schools from New Haven.
New Haven.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I think hockey, I don’t think New Haven.
In addition to which, the whole Quinnipiac-Yale juxtaposition is juicy. Quinnipiac is a comer, a hard-charging, ambitious school eager to raise its profile. Yale is, well, my God, Yale is Yale, and no more need be said.
This is almost a town-gown deal, and I can only imagine how exciting this must be for the Quinnipiac community. When I visited their magnificent athletic facility in February of last year, a superb edifice in which you enter and turn right for the hockey rink and left for the basketball court and which happens to be perched high on a hill, director of athletics Jack McDonald was telling me that the little Quinnipiac joke is that from their elevated height they can “look down on Yale.” And indeed, they can. Imagine if they were to wind up defeating Yale for the national championship.