At 7 a.m. Friday, I take off for Worcester, Mass. [Why is it pronounced Wooster?]

But before I do, I have some things to clean up in the office. I entered a NCAA tournament office pool for fun. Picked a WCHA team to win it, also picked the Gophers to make the Frozen Four. I also did something I don’t like to do. After picking all the winners, I went back and changed my mind on a couple.

There have to be some first-round upsets after all. So here’s a doozy: Air Force over Miami (Ohio). And another one: Wisconsin over Denver.

Went with the favorites in the other games, except had to take Gophers to win to make my trip East more worthwhile.

I have Michigan and North Dakota playing for the championship, with North Dakota winning. But don’t go by what I say in your pools.

My feeling is if they played this tournament 10 times, there would be at least six different winners. A hot goalie and a little luck go a long ways in the NCAA.

Who do you like and why? I picked Air Force because the Falcons have 10 Minnesota kids who know how to play hockey. Air Force tied the Gophers 2-2 this year and also played Boston College (won’t say what that score was).

Picked Wisconsin over Denver because of justice. During the regular season the Badgers had a late goal disallowed, which would have given them a tie against the Pioneers at least. Later the WCHA apologized and said the goal should have counted but UW lost the game.

Flimsy reasons but sometimes you have hunches.

HOBEY VOTING

As an NCCA hockey fan, you can vote for your Hobey Baker favorite among the 10 finalists at http://www.hobeybaker.com/voting/  I just cast my vote and saw it counted.

Fan voting counts for a whopping 1 percent. So I am not too worried my vote will sway the selection.

My pick was Jean-Philippe Lamoureux, the North Dakota goalie. He has played every minute and has great numbers.

He also is second in the fan voting as of 6 p.m. Thursday. Somebody might have been stuffing the online voting boxes cause the leader was Simon Lambert, a senior forward at Rochester Institute of Technology with 4,321 votes.

Next was J.P. with 3,726 and third was T.J. Oshie of the Fighting Sioux with 1,129.

Where was the favorite, senior foward Kevin Porter of Michigan? He had 503 votes. Ouch.

Nathan Gerbe of Boston College also was way down with only 230 among the first 11,388 cast. Maybe the Beantown precincts have not been counted yet.

The field of 10 finalists will be cut to three on April 2 and the winner will be named April 11.

One other WCHA player is also a finalist, sophomore Ryan Lasch of St. Cloud State.

Who are you voting for?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Gophers men's hockey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.