Cornell, Boston and college hockey's boon at Madison Square Garden
Boston University players celebrate a goal by forward Ahti Oksanen during the first period of the NCAA men's Frozen Four championship game against Providence in Boston on Saturday, April 11, 2015. Credit: AP / Elise Amendola
College hockey always has been an unusual piece of the sports landscape, a huge draw in small pockets of the country and mostly invisible elsewhere.
So when Madison Square Garden, Cornell and Boston University launched the first major college hockey event at the Garden in more than 30 years in 2007, expectations were modest and the prospects uncertain.
"There was some concern about what the break-even point was going to be, and I think at that time it was like 6,000 people," said Mike Schafer, the Cornell coach then and now.
"And it was like, well, if we can't get 6,000 people from Cornell and BU to go to this game, there is something wrong. And it just took off . . . It's been awesome."
The game sold out that Thanksgiving weekend and inspired a revival of the sport in New York that continues to evolve.
Cornell and BU will play their fifth every-other-year "Red Hot Hockey" event Saturday. In the years they don't meet, the Big Red now plays another school - Michigan in 2012, Penn State in 2014 and an as-yet-unnamed opponent next November.
Harvard and Yale started playing one another there with games in January of 2014 and 2015. Harvard will face Quinnipiac on Jan. 9, 2016.
On Jan. 30, the first of at least four annual Big Ten doubleheaders will have Penn State and Michigan play a basketball game in the afternoon and a hockey game at night. So that's three college hockey games in one season.
Come 2016-17, Cornell will play again, and Harvard and Yale will play again, and two Big Ten teams will play again, with a fourth game to be added when North Dakota faces Boston College next Dec. 3.
North Dakota!
Selling tickets usually is a snap for Cornell given its avid fan base, its large New York-area alumni population and the fact many undergraduates are home for the holiday. "It's just something very natural," Schafer said.
But just as importantly, the Garden visits help Schafer (and other coaches) sell to recruits. Schafer said that for many, both from the New York area and beyond, "it's a dream to play at Madison Square Gardens."
(Schafer is from Ontario and usually adds the "s" when referring to the Garden, in the Canadian style that harkens to the Maple Leaf Gardens era. His wife, Diane, is from Mineola.)
He said the rapid expansion of college hockey in New York has been nothing but positive for the sport.
"I think any time you're in a major media market and they're selling out it is good for college hockey," he said.
Part of the magic is the Garden itself. In 2010, Cornell and Colgate attracted a small crowd to the Prudential Center in Newark. On Nov. 1 of this year, Notre Dame and Connecticut played to a sparse audience at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
"The Garden is a big part of all this," said Joel Fisher, MSG Sports' executive vice president. "We knew if we got the right matchups after that first one that this could be a really good product for the fans of New York . . . It's become a great franchise for us."
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.