Big hockey series

No. 1 Miami University (25-3-0) faces off Friday and Saturday against No. 2 Michigan (22-3-3) at the Goggin Ice Center in Oxford. This is a very exciting time to be a Redsk ..., er, RedHawk. (The team nickname is a blog entry for another time.)

I've been an Ohio State fan all my life, and I always will be (even though Bob Knight played there), but I never really considered it when I was looking at colleges. I wound up at Miami, a non-BCS Division I school (no, the BCS didn't exist in the late '80s and early '90s, but we all understood that the Mid-American Conference was not the Big 10), which meant that the best we could reasonably hope for on a year-to-year basis was winning MAC championships in the various sports. Our football team was second-tier at best, our basketball teams were second-tier at best, our baseball team, our swimming team, our field hockey team, and so on and so forth.

From a national standpoint, we've had a couple of good years in individual sports: Wally Szczerbiak's 1998-99 basketball team reached the Sweet 16 before losing a highly respectable 58-48 to Kentucky; and Ben Roethlisberger's 2003 football team went 12-1, its only loss in the season opener against Iowa, and ended the season No. 10 in the nation. The lesson? In order to be a superstar athlete at Miami University, you have to have a name that only people smart enough to get into Miami can spell.

But in ice hockey ― and only in ice hockey ― Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, is NOT a second-tier school. We are a member of the first-tier Central Collegiate Hockey Association. We are in the same league as Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State ― and even Notre Dame. Brian Savage, who would go on to play 12 years in the NHL, played at Miami while I was there.

The setup in college hockey is TOTALLY different from all the other sports. Several schools that are Division II or Division III in other sports are big-time powers in hockey. The last back-to-back national champion was the University of Denver. When's the last time you heard about the University of Denver's basketball or football team? Among other traditional Division I powers ― all of whom are currently in the top 20 ― are North Dakota, New Hampshire, Colorado College, Minnesota-Duluth and Clarkson.

Oh, yes. And Miami. In fact, if you check college hockey Web sites, you'll see that Miami University is not even referred to as "Miami (Ohio)." It's just "Miami." You know how, if you look at the national football pool and see the word "Miami" on the list? You don't have to ask which Miami. It's the one in Florida. Duh!

Well, Miami of Florida doesn't even have a hockey team, as far as I know. You never see "Miami (Ohio)" on a hockey poll. Of course it's the one in Ohio.

But even in ice hockey, Miami has never won a national championship. In fact, they were never really a national power until quite recently, after Savage's former teammate Enrico Blasi became the head coach in 1999. Blasi had cut his teeth as an assistant at Denver under his former Miami coach, George Gwozdecky. It took Blasi awhile to build up the program, but he's done a fantastic job. The RedHawks reached the Elite Eight last year before losing 4-0 to Boston College ― the same team that knocked them out 5-0 in the first round in 2006 (the tournament is only 16 teams to begin with in hockey, so the office pools are somewhat less exciting).

And this year, they've been ranked No. 1 for much of the season, trading back and forth with fellow CCHA power Michigan. I went to see them in Bowling Green (the BG Falcons, Miami and the Western Michigan Broncos are the only MAC schools in the CCHA) the Saturday of the first weekend of 2008, and the Hawks looked pretty darned good. They won 5-2 and almost made it 6-2 with an empty-netter. They skated faster and controlled the puck better than the Falcons. But one of Miami's three losses is to BG, and it was actually the previous night.

And now Miami and Michigan are the top two teams in the country, and they're playing this weekend. I've been led to believe Friday night's game, at least, is being shown on TV, but I don't seem to have it on my cable. I don't know who's carrying it, but apparently somebody is.