“Me and the seniors talked about it, and we want a regular season championship,” senior forward Chris Mueller said. “The past three years, we haven’t put ourselves in that position in the beginning. After Christmas, we’ve probably been the best team in the country the past two years. November is usually our dark month.”

The two games are part of a stretch where the Spartans play 10 of 12 games at home, where MSU was 13-3-1 last season.

“Winning at home is a big thing,” senior captain Bryan Lerg said.

“You don’t ever want to lose at home, first of all, and the beginning of the year is when we’ve struggled these past few years. We’ve been in that little downfall around Halloween or that time. We need to make sure we stay away from that and stay consistent.”

Even though the Spartans are 17-19-6 in October and November the past three seasons, none of the those schedules featured so many home games to start the season.

“We have an opportunity where we have a lot of home games,” Mueller said.

“Michigan State hockey, we’re not supposed to lose at home.

“Notre Dame and Miami the last two years have won the league because they’ve gotten such a big jump. If we can win these home games, we can put ourselves in that position like they did the last two years.”

Northern Michigan is coming off a weekend sweep at the hands of Michigan, dropping the two games 3-1 and 4-3. The Wildcats carry a 1-3-0 record into the weekend.

“I’m sure they’re all tuned up and ready to go,” Lerg said. “They’ve obviously playing some good hockey if they only lost 4-3 to Michigan. We need to be ready to go.”

Although the Wildcats have struggled to score, netting just seven goals in four games, forward Nick Sirota has had a hand in five of those goals, with two goals and three assists.

Brian Stewart is in his first season as Northern Michigan’s starting goaltender and has a 3.76 goals-against average and a .868 save percentage. At 6-foot-4, he covers a lot of the goal and will force MSU to crash the net to score this weekend.

“I wish you could adjust how you put the puck on the net, but you just try to get good shots,” MSU head coach Rick Comley said.

“If you get a lot of clean shots, then you try to make a big kid move, but it’s so hard to get clean shots, and they’re such a defensive team that’ll we’ll try to get shots, get traffic and work for rebounds.”

Recently, the series between these two teams has been streaky.

The teams have split the last eight meetings, with the Wildcats winning the first four and the Spartans taking the last four.

The teams will meet four times this season.