MSU won the season series with a 3-1 win in East Lansing on Jan. 11 and a 1-1 tie Jan. 13 in South Bend, Ind.

“Those were two really highly competitive games,” assistant coach Tom Newton said. “They both came right down to the wire. What you take from it is that this is a good hockey team that we’re playing and they are capable of beating anybody any night, but we know if we play our game we’re more than capable of beating them, too.”

In that game, the Fighting Irish scored the tying goal with under a minute to play.

“It’s going to be a very tight game,” senior forward Chris Mueller said. “Is it going to be a defensive game? I couldn’t tell you that, but we have to throw who we’re playing out the window. This is to go to the Frozen Four again. It doesn’t matter if we were playing Michigan or another team we’ve never played before.”

The two teams met in last season’s Midwest Regional final with the Spartans picking up a 2-1 win en route to the national title.

“We know Notre Dame will be real fired up because we beat them in the regional final last year and kind of upset them in their mind,” junior goaltender Jeff Lerg said. “We know that when we lost to Maine (in 2006) that’s all we thought about. We got the chance to replay them and we ended up on top, so we know how Notre Dame’s feeling in their locker room.”

Not many projected MSU moving past Colorado College, especially after MSU was upset by Northern Michigan in the CCHA playoffs.

“We’re excited to be playing,” MSU head coach Rick Comley said.

Notre Dame exploded for seven goals against New Hampshire after only scoring more than two goals twice in 13 games in February and March.

“They were struggling to score goals for a little bit there, but then they go and get six or seven and all of a sudden their confidence is back and they’re the team they were in the first half,” Lerg said. “They were a tough team to play in the first half of the year. They’ll be confident tomorrow.”

Newton said the team will review some video clips to prepare on short notice.

“We’ll look at their power play and penalty killing, some of the systematic things that we can be prepared for from them,” Newton said. “They’re a team that’s very faceoff savvy, so we have to be ready for that. But we have all that, it’s not something they haven’t seen before. It’ll be review.”