The Nanooks are coming to town.

After sweeping Western Michigan this weekend to close out the regular season, the MSU hockey team earned a first-round CCHA Tournament matchup with ninth-place Alaska-Fairbanks starting Friday at Munn Ice Arena.

It's been quite a turnaround for the Spartans (21-13-2 overall, 17-10-1 CCHA), who bottomed out at 10th place in the league in early January.

They steadily recovered and nearly sneaked into a third-place tie with Ohio State this weekend, but the Buckeyes tied Michigan twice, leaving them one point ahead of MSU in the final standings.

So the Spartans are the No. 4 seed in the league tournament and will match up with the red-hot Nanooks (15-12-7, 10-11-7) in the best-of-three first round. Fairbanks is 6-0-3 in its last nine games.

"I don't think anyone would have predicted after our first half, what's happened this second half," senior defenseman John-Michael Liles said. "We've been able to play really well. Hopefully, we can just keep getting bounces in the playoffs."

This weekend, MSU beat the Broncos 4-0 on Friday in Kalamazoo, and 8-5 on Saturday at Munn.

Though the Spartans have won 13 of their last 18 games, the sweep of Western (15-19-2, 13-14-1) was their first series sweep since mid-January.

But it didn't help them at all in the Pairwise Rankings. On Sunday afternoon, MSU was in a four-way tie for 16th in the rating system that predicts the NCAA Tournament field.

MSU head coach Rick Comley thinks his team has to at least advance to the CCHA Tournament championship game to be considered for an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament.

The winner of the league tourney gets an automatic bid.

"(Our) three losses to Niagara, Bowling Green and Lake Superior are awful," Comley said. "Whether we can ever overcome that