Do you believe in miracles?
The Morgantown Mohawks hockey team almost iced one in Minnesota this past March, making it all the way to national finals of its division before the puck finally hit the net on the wrong side of the ice.
“We kept winning,” winger Nate Rodgers said, “and then we started thinking that we might actually take it all.”
Don’t liken them to the “Mighty Ducks” — or any other shaggy-dog, ragtag team on ice Hollywood loves to depict in the occasional (though mostly rare) hockey movie it might send to the multiplex, head coach Rob Rockis said Monday.
In fact, the coach said, he’d put the team’s talent up with anyone on the ice — especially since the Mohawks “definitely worked harder than most,” to get there.
That’s because his team doesn’t have the infrastructure — no big rinks — or the popularity that the other teams had in those rounds of 2023 Chipotle-USA Hockey Division II National Championships.
Even with the highly visible, and most certainly fan-devoted, Pittsburgh Penguins of the National Hockey League right next door.
And, he said, the Mohawks consist of players from high schools across north-central West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania, where hockey either doesn’t exist — or doesn’t have the rosters put up by, say, football, basketball, soccer and lacrosse.
The national championship games in which the Mohawks excelled were right next door to Minneapolis, in the state that’s a hotbed for a sport on ice that manages to be fierce, and precise, at the same time.
Teams from South Carolina, Utah and elsewhere were iced by the Mohawks who finally fell to a regional rival, Bishop Canevin, of Pennsylvania.
“Yeah, we went all the way to Minnesota to lose to a team from next door,” Jacob Hollander said, grinning and shaking his head.
“We’re definitely going to be a hungry hockey team next season,” he said.
The team on Monday was a grateful one, as it called on Albert Wright, the president and CEO of the WVU Health System, which sponsored the team and helped defray travel costs, given the scarcity of prep hockey leagues here.
Mohawks shook his hand and presented him a team jersey (No. 23, for the championship year), to go with a framed photograph of the team and a grouping of miniature hockey sticks done out with everyone’s autograph.
“These are going in my man cave,” the CEO asserted, as he held up the offerings like the Stanley Cup.
“You did a great job and you did us proud,” he said.
“I can’t wait for next season. You went out there [Minnesota] and showed everyone.”
Skating past misconceptions, long an Appalachian litmus test, made team captain Robin Anderson, a senior winger and the lone female among the Mohawks, want to compete that much harder under the lights in a place — as said — where hockey shines year-round.
“They might have underestimated us,” she said of the team’s opponents on the 2022-23 schedule.
“At first.”
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