“The first month of the season is a little monotonous with waking up every day and having the same stuff going on,” senior forward Greg Wolfe said. “The guys are really excited to start playing. It was a really long offseason for us. We had a lot to think about. The guys are in the right frame of mind.”

MSU beat Western Ontario, 4-1, on Oct. 9 in the only exhibition game of the preseason.

The Minutemen have already played a pair of games with a 3-1 loss to then-No.19 Boston University and a 5-2 loss at then-No. 1 UMass-Lowell.

Head coach Tom Anastos said taking a young team to a new place will be a challenge, and he expects UMass to be ready, especially with a couple of games under their belt.

“(UMass) will be in a better place now, a week from where they were last weekend,” Anastos said. “They’ll have game conditioning, and it’s their home opener weekend, so I expect them to play with lots of energy.”

For the Spartans, this will be the latest start to the season since the 1993-94 campaign when the puck dropped for the first time on Oct. 22.

A season ago, MSU played their exhibition game on a Monday then turned around on Friday for a game in Minnesota.

“It’s important for us to get into shape, and it give us an extra week to get into our systems,” Wolfe said. “It’s time to fine tune some confidence, and it’s time to work towards goals that we’ve been working on and focus on our game. It’s nice to have that extra time to focus on that.”

Junior forward Matt Berry, sophomore defenseman John Draeger and sophomore goalie Nate Phillips all had surgery in September and will return to the ice in December.

Junior forward Tanner Sorenson will not make the trip after Anastos suspended him for violating team rules, and freshman forward Villiam Haag will make the trip, but won’t dress Friday night after an NCAA violation.

“It’s related to where he played before Sweden,” Anastos said. “He traveled with a team and (the NCAA) deemed that he needed to sit out one game of NCAA play to be eligible.”

The Spartans haven’t seen the ice in the Mullins Center, but they’re 3-0 all-time against UMass, with their last meeting ending in a 3-1 win for the Spartans.

A year ago the Spartans struggled to find their feet early in the season, but picked up the pace and found the right mindset as the season went on.

For sophomore forward Mike Ferrantino, getting a couple wins against UMass at the beginning of the season would put the team in that mindset from the get-go.

“When you start losing games, it affects you mentally, but we battled through that really well and towards the end of the year we started to play our best hockey,” Ferrantino said. “The confidence is high right now, everybody’s looking good in practice, so coming out strong and getting a few wins under our belt will only help with that and make our confidence grow that much more.”