Minnesota Dreaming

International Falls. Six foot snow drifts and daily high temperatures of 10 below. Lutheranism. The worst baseball park this side of Seattle's Kingdome. Maybe Lake Wobegone and Garrison Keillor.

And little kids playing pond hockey for hours on end, their mothers interrupting only to give them cups of hot cocoa.

Ask me to brainstorm on Minnesota, and these are some of the images I would imagine. But I'd first think of the arctic winters, and with cold weather my thoughts instantly go inside.

Hockey. The North Stars. A cinderella run to the 1991 Stanley Cup Finals. And owner Norm Green's heinous heist of the only professional hockey team from a state where the sport is revered as an institution on the order of church and family.

With the Stars off to Dallas, Minnesota's puck culture has fallen back upon its lower levels; to an outsider, it may come as a surprise to say that it has hardly missed a beat. Friday night high school hockey is often a big social event for small towns miles away from the metropolis of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

And the three major college teams in the state--Minnesota, St. Cloud State and Minnesota-Duluth--all have devoted, rabid fan support.

"To a certain degree, they're the only games in town, and I think when there's not a log going on, it gets a little more hype, and a lot more interest."

Those are the words of Harvard men's hockey Coach Ronn Tomassoni, and he should know--he grew up in Eveleth, Minn., home of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame and not much else.

And with his team playing a two-game set at Minnesota-Duluth this weekend, he has a right to feel a little excited. It's the Crimson's first trip to the Land of 10,000 Lakes since 1989, and the first time during the Tomassoni era--a little of Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound", if you please?

"Yep--that's my neck of the woods, and it's always exciting to get back there," he says with a gleam in his eye. "And even moreso for the Minnesota kids on the team--Kirk Nielsen and Stuart Swenson get a chance to play close to home, and they're pretty excited."

I'll say. "I've been excited about these games ever since I got here," says Swenson, a freshman who calls St. Cloud home during the summer months. "It was really a big selling point on choosing Harvard; I knew I could get away and go to a great school, but I'm still getting a chance to play at home.

"And I'm going to have close to 50 people in to watch the games each night."

Nielsen, a sophomore from Grand Rapids, is similarly enthused about the trip; his high school coach will be at both games, as well as a lot of good friends who matriculated at UMD. And he knows what kind of atmosphere he's in for tonight from personal experience.

"I came from a pretty small community, and the big event in town Friday night was our hockey game," he says. "The amount of support our team got there was so much greater than even what we get at Harvard, and don't get me wrong, the fans are pretty enthusiastic here."

He pauses, and as if from another planet, he intones, "It's really something you kind of have to experience to understand."

Both Nielsen and Swenson racked up credentials of the highest order during their high school careers; both were finalists for the "Mr. Hockey" award, Minnesota's answer to Hobey Baker, and Swenson last year led the entire state in scoring.

"It's always been a hockey hotbed," Tomassoni says, "and it's great to get in there every once in a while and get your program that exposure."

Times are tough these days for the former home of St. Louis Blues' sharpshooter Brett Hull; Minnesota-Duluth is but 1-8-2 in its last 11, and the defending WCHA regular-season champions now find themselves at the bottom of the standings with an overall record of 4-9-3.

But the fans still regularly pack the 5,664-seat Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center. And the Bulldogs split two earlier games with ECAC power St. Lawrence, so Harvard must be on its guard.

"It'll be a little like playing up in Canton or Potsdam," Tomassoni says, referring to the similar smalltown atmosphere surrounding St. Lawrence and fellow ECAC rival Clarkson in the frozen north of upstate New York. "But our kids like playing in front of enthusiastic crowds like that, whether at home or on the road--these are the kinds of games they live to play."

And well they should. For if you were to take the pulse of American amateur hockey, you'd have to reach out to the state of Minnesota--and as guys like Tomassoni, Swenson, and Nielsen know, it's something the Crimson will have to experience to understand.

Darren M. Kilfara is a Crimson staff writer.