Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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Howe, wearing a Hartford Whalers jersey, returned home a few months afterward for the 1980 All-Star game. Two years later, the CCHA made "The Joe" a permanent home for its conference tournament semifinals and final. *** Jackson's connection to the CCHA stretches back further than Joe Louis Arena's. He played in net for Michigan State in the late 1970s shortly before the Spartans became a superpower under Mason. He returned to college hockey and the conference in 1986, when he was hired as an assistant on Frank Anzalone's staff at Lake Superior State. "I made the left hand turn instead of the right hand turn to bring him there, to get him out of the Detroit junior hockey thing and to get his chance," Anzalone said. "He earned that opportunity. He's taken advantage of that through the highs and the lows, and for him it's mostly been highs." Jackson took over for Anzalone in 1990. He won four conference titles in a five-year stretch and added two national championships that at the time seemed almost like an afterthought. In those days, every team in the CCHA started the year with the goal of making it to Detroit. The conference in its early history was a collection of mostly small Michigan and Ohio schools propped up by two goliaths, Michigan and Michigan State. The Spartans and the Wolverines were perennial mainstays at the semifinals and drew sell-out crowds in a city that hadn't yet hit its rough patch. The rest of the league jockeyed for its chance to sling rocks at the local giants and occasionally take them down. The whole season became about playing on that stage. Commissioner Bill Beagan coined the term "Road To The Joe" to capture the sentiment in the mid-1980s, and that slogan has stayed with the CCHA ever since. "If your school got there, it was huge. That was the highlight of the year," Anzalone said. "If you got to the Early Exit Halts Irish Again The momentum No. 1-seeded Notre Dame carried into the NCAA Tournament from Detroit screeched to a stop against St. Cloud State. The Bulldogs beat the Irish 5-1 in the opening round of the Midwest Regional. First-round upsets are becoming an unsettling trend for head coach Jeff Jackson's teams in South Bend. The Irish have played in five NCAA Tournaments in eight years under Jackson. They reached the Frozen Four as a No. 3 seed and No. 4 seed, but have struggled in three trips as the top seed in their region. The only tournament game Notre Dame has won as the favorite was a double-overtime victory over AlabamaHuntsville in 2007. The parity in college hockey, coupled with only 16 teams in the tournament and a single elimination format, makes upsets commonplace in the tournament. A No. 4 seed, Yale, won the national championship this year. Still, Jackson says he's puzzled as to why his team has floundered on the national stage all three times it has won the CCHA Tournament under his watch. "It's a matter of where they are emotionally after the previous week. It's hard for me to put my finger on," Jackson said. "One thing I haven't been able to figure out here is how to deal with … just the way kids are nowadays it's easy to get distracted and lose sight of what they just did to win a championship." — Dan Murphy