It was supposed to be last year's MSU hockey team that had all the glory, not this year's squad.
After losing a large portion of the team's offense, as well as several steady, reliable defensemen, hardly anybody would have expected the 2006-07 Spartans to surpass last year's team.
But it happened.
Last season
After starting out the 2005-06 season around the .500 mark and battling through several key injuries, the Spartans were looking for some kind of turnaround.
MSU got its spark when then-freshman goaltender Jeff Lerg took over in net and led the Spartans on a 17-4-3 second-half surge.
"Last year was a really good team, I think from Christmas on," MSU head coach Rick Comley said.
Behind Lerg's goaltending and a stingy defense, the Spartans captured the 2006 CCHA Tournament Championship and earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, becoming a national favorite.
But the Spartans could only ride the offensive play of injured senior David Booth and the defense of Corey Potter and Jared Nightingale for so long. Their season ended in a 5-4 loss to Maine in the NCAA Regional Finals.
"If David Booth hadn't gotten hurt, I think we would have won the national championship," Comley said.
"He played, but he wasn't ever back. That stretch of games before he got hurt (in the playoffs against Alaska), he was the best player in the country in my mind."
This season
Based on the success from 2005-06, it was fitting that preseason talk surrounded MSU's chances of getting to the Frozen Four.
But it didn't take long for the Spartans to appreciate the contributions of the departed seniors and former captain Drew Miller, who opted to forgo his final year of eligibility and sign with the NHL's Anaheim Ducks in the offseason.
"This year we still liked our team, and then we lost Drew," Comley said.
"He made his own personal decision, and it was a good decision for him, and we're happy for him, but he took the heart and soul out of our locker room late in the summer.
"We couldn't replace the talent, didn't fill the scholarship, but it didn't matter. We couldn't replace him."
MSU wasn't as deep as it was the previous season, and the incoming class struggled at times to find its niche.
"We really had a good team last year," Comley said.
"So you're going, as a coach, 'OK, I just want to progress.' We knew that we had good seniors, good kids, but our talent was in our middle group."
The Spartans hung around the .500 mark at Christmastime, but then won the Great Lakes Invitational Championship and embarked on a nine-game unbeaten streak from January to mid-February, the nation's longest such streak at the time.
But MSU went 1-4 to end the regular season, a drought that included being swept by Western Michigan and losing to CCHA bottom-feeder Bowling Green at Munn Ice Arena on Senior Night.
"There was so much pressure on us in the second half of the season because of what the national standings were like and the PairWise and getting into the tournament," senior captain Chris Lawrence said.
"That was our main focus. I think we had so much pressure on us to get into the tournament."
After beating Lake Superior in the CCHA Tournament's third-place consolation game, the Spartans earned a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament's Midwest Region.
"Once we got into the tournament, it was kind of a sense of relief, and guys were able to go in and just play, not worry about how this is going to affect us tomorrow because if we lost, there wasn't a tomorrow," Lawrence said.
And now, after wins against Boston and Notre Dame in the tournament, the improbable Spartans are going to St. Louis to vie for their first national championship since 1986.
"This year coming in, we weren't supposed to be as good as we are, or we weren't supposed to be as good as we have been," senior defenseman Tyler Howells said.
"But at the same time, that kind of adds fuel to the fire for us. We want to go out there and prove it to people."
The Spartans play Maine at 4 p.m. Thursday in the national semifinals in the first game at the Frozen Four.
