Halli Krzyzaniak preserving a program’s all-round picture

(Photo courtesy of UND Media Relations)

Halli Krzyzaniak only needed to stand for her first Canadian national team portrait in 2014 to tell an as-yet-unfamiliar world what she was — and still is — all about. Her choice to keep on her eyewear for that particular shoot set her apart from her teammates, fashion-wise. Three years later, it retroactively symbolizes her status in the program, namely as a graduated, yet unfinished student.

Two months into her sophomore year at the University of North Dakota, and barely eight months after her country corralled its fourth straight Olympic gold medal, Krzyzaniak cracked Canada’s roster at the 2014 Four Nations Cup. This meant missing a weekend of intercollegiate action, plus a week of classes in Grand Forks.

But she did not ditch her best intellectual persona in the process. Trade the red and black for blue and red, and the maple leaf for an “S”, and one would think Kara Danvers neglected to complete her transformation out of haste. 

For the customary stickblade-in-the-camera and stick-behind-the-shoulders poses, Krzyzaniak proudly sported Hockey Canada’s 100th anniversary patch on her No. 25 jersey. Above all of the visible gear, she sported a pair of rectangular glasses with frames almost as bold and black as the shoulder caps on her jersey. 

The hockey equipment signaled that Krzyzaniak has the athletic potential of Meghan Mikkelson. The spectacles signified that she, both superficially and within, has the head of Alex Dunphy.

Six semesters and eight IIHF events later, she does not quite have the superstar ceiling of Hayley Wickenheiser. But she does bear the same basic, all-round aspirations as the five-time Olympic puckster who is now embarking on medical school after hanging up her skates earlier this year.

Krzyzaniak is chasing her first Olympic roster spot on the heels of obtaining the WCHA’s postgraduate scholarship. The scholarship entails a $7,500 grant toward continuing education, which Krzyzaniak plans to pursue en route to a career in orthopedics.

For her alma mater, which saw its final shift of NCAA women’s hockey action for the foreseeable future March 4, the scholarship makes for one last bragging-rights bow.

“Receiving this scholarship from the WCHA definitely helps my pride in coming from the WCHA and playing in such a great league against some of the best players in the world,” she said in a phone interview with Pucks and Recreation.

Krzyzaniak is far from the last bastion of the North Dakota women’s hockey program, which the university administration euthanized in late March. All players with remaining collegiate eligibility are free to disperse to other programs. At least nine have already transferred to another NCAA Division I school, while two others are going to the Canadian Interuniversity system.

Among the alumnae, twin sisters Jocelyne and Monique Lamoureux are gunning for their third go-round with the U.S. Olympic team. Michelle Karvinen and Susanna Tapani could both represent Team Finland next February, as could undergraduates Anna Kilponen, Emma Nuutinen and Vilma Tanskanen. Amy Menke is an NWHL prospect for the New York Riveters.

But barring an eventual replenishment, Krzyzaniak will be a part of the Fighting Hawks’ last graduating class. She will be a part of their last cluster of captains, having sported an “A” over her heart her junior and senior season.

And whenever she resumes her studies, she will be the last student-athlete in the program’s run to attend school with financial aid that she earned as a direct result of contributing to UND.

 “Especially with everything that did happen with the North Dakota program,” she said, “it’s really nice to know that I can still be a continuing part of the WCHA even after my graduation and coming out of our hockey program.”

Krzyzaniak came into the UND women’s hockey program when it was coming off its first two NCAA tournament appearances in 2012 and 2013. (Both runs ended in quarterfinal losses to league rival and national dynasty Minnesota.) She came in with three years of experience with the Canadian U-18 national team, plus an ornate background with Team Manitoba already to her credit.

Krzyzaniak entered the rigorous UND pre-health studies program with a desire to emulate her mother, Kelly, a family physician in their rural Manitoba hometown of Neepawa. The same way a conventional Canadian catches a craze through the tales of their ice-going idols, she acquired her additional ambitions through her mother’s stories of medical school and getting to know a community through an essential service.

“I guess I kind of grew up around her and just seeing what she did…the day-to-day happenings and knowing what she does and having so much pride in her occupation is mostly what’s drawn me towards that,” she said.

Though the Fighting Hawks never returned to the national bracket with Kryzaniak’s input, they finished .500 or better overall in each of her four seasons. As a sophomore and junior, her individual impact translated to a spot on the all-WCHA third team. In each of those two years, the conference also recognized her as a scholar-athlete and an all-academic honoree.

In 2016-17, Krzyzaniak was one of only four Division I women’s hockey players to make one of CoSIDA’s academic all-district scrolls. She was her sports only representative in District Six, which covers all of the women’s WCHA’s territory except Ohio State.

Theoretically, that made it easier for the UND athletic program’s veteran faculty representative, Dr. Sue Jeno, to nominate the university’s candidate for the league’s postgraduate scholarship, which she has done in 11 years on the job.

Four other hockey players (two women’s, two men’s) had previously won continuing financial assistance with Jeno’s good word. With Krzyzaniak’s selection, she gave Jeno and her team a third, plus a repeat following goaltender Shelby Amsley-Benzie’s honor in 2016.

And now, along with 2012 OSU alumna Natalie Spooner, she joins 10 other WCHA ambassadors — all of whom represent UND’s perennial on-ice superiors from Minnesota, Minnesota-Duluth and Wisconsin — on Canada’s centralized roster. She does so as the only one with a selective league-issued academic scholarship waiting patiently on the backburner.

Head on a swivel

While working out with 27 other Olympic candidates in Fredericton, N.B., Krzyzaniak admitted her education will continue at a school to be named later. At present, she is tempted to return close to home by enrolling at the University of Manitoba. But the interim will be long enough for other enticements to emerge, and if there was ever a time that called for a gap year, the 2017-18 hockey season is it.

At the time of her debut with the national program’s big club, Krzyzaniak was one of 10 newbies joining the holdovers from the 2014 Sochi Games. In the wake of three straight silver-medal runs at the IIHF World Championship, her odds and desires for Pyeongchang have only emboldened.

But there are five cuts to come. At least two, maybe three of those will be among the nine centralized defenders Krzyzaniak stands with, including the Vancouver and Sochi veteran Mikkelson. 

As one of five blueliners without prior Olympic experience, she can ill afford an irrecoverable misstep in her protracted tryout. She cannot lose focus. With that said, if her retelling of the WCHA scholarship derby is any indication, she will have little trouble muzzling the scholastic hounds as necessary.

“I didn’t really think too much about it,” she said. “I was away at the World Championships at the time of the nomination, so for me it was kind of just an afterthought.”

Still, the same basic instinct that drew the syrup on her undergraduate sundae — multifold major in honors, biology and pre-health, 3.92 great-point average and all — can help her toward the big scoop she craves in her athletic dish.

Following a seven-week summer break, the Canadian women will reconvene in Calgary on Aug. 1, kicking off a six-month grind before the chosen 23 cross the Pacific. The broad timeline of the singular project resembles — if only vaguely — the senior thesis Krzyzaniak compiled over the last school year.

Per the program’s website, UND’s pre-health majors are expected to uphold following five pillars: “Complete any prerequisite coursework for the professional school or program of their choice as advised.” “Maintain a competitive cumulative GPA (3.0 minimum).” “Take the standardized entrance exam for their field of choice.” “Visit with the Health Sciences Advisor regularly.” “Visit with their major advisor regularly.”

One could liken all of those to, say, building and sustaining one’s Olympic candidacy through regular and visible involvement in the short-order Four Nations Cup and World Championship.

But after letting out an audible, contemplative, “Hmm,” Krzyzaniak singled out the colossal culmination as her defining stage in the pre-health program. Marathons of solitary research and one-on-one work with a professor would yield a page count in the triple digits on her thesis.

“Just having that self-discipline and time management and knowing that the due date wasn’t very close, but I still had to get this very large body of work done,” she said. “It really helped me to be disciplined enough to force myself work on it for a couple of hours every day make sure that I put aside enough time with my other coursework in order to finish the whole project.”

While her upcoming endeavor will not have the company of other commitments, but plenty of human company, it will consume Krzyzniak’s calendar in a comparable manner. In turn, she will again need to manufacture her own urgency in the opening month to prevent it from mounting on its own in the homestretch.

To put that another way, the willpower that fed the inner Alex Dunphy in the 2016-17 academic almanac must now go back to the Halli Krzyzaniak who made an impression at the Pursuit of Excellence Hockey Academy in Kamloops, B.C.

Prior to Krzyzaniak’s first Four Nations Cup, former POE coach Scott Spencer told Christine Ulmer of Hockey Canada’s website, “Halli’s work ethic is second to none. I’ve never seen someone as driven, determined and committed.”

But just as she balanced the Fighting Hawks and Team Canada with her course load, Krzyzaniak could still fetch a few breathers amidst the Olympic tryout. While she is in Alberta, she may take the opportunity to explore the University of Calgary, whose medical doctoral program has ranked among Canada’s top 10 by Maclean’s, the country’s premier college ranker.

As a 2016 draft choice of the NWHL’s Boston Pride, Krzyzaniak may also have long-term options below the 49th parallel. The Pride’s area code boasts three of U.S. News and World Report’s top 50 medical schools in Harvard (ranked No. 1), Boston University and Tufts.

“My main focus in hockey right now is training and competing to hopefully play in the Olympic Games,” Krzyzaniak insisted, before allowing, “That’s definitely something that I would look into, knowing that there are some really great medical schools out there. So if that was something that I would be able to work, so that I was able to play hockey and go to medical school at the same time, that’s something I would definitely look into.”

Plenty to ‘lean on’

Minus her mother, Krzyzaniak is not one to single out influences by name. The habitual team orientation that boosted her leadership credentials in the UND locker room also served to cut down the tales from the UND classrooms that ultimately yielded her scholarship.

“Really, all of the professors at UND were super great and super helpful,” she said. “Knowing the schedule that I had as a student-athlete, and then leaving fairly often for events with my national team, they were very supportive in helping me achieve the grades that I wanted to while missing so much time, and to be able to graduate within four years…I wouldn’t have been able to do it if they weren’t so helpful.”

The calls to give back some of that moral support have rang, if not early and often, then suddenly and harshly. On Nov. 17, 2014 — three weeks after Krzyzaniak traded her specs for her shield to skate in her first Four Nations Cup — North Dakota classmate and teammate Lisa Marvin sustained a multitude of gruesome injuries in a near-fatal auto wreck. 

As Pat Borzi of the New York Times articulated much later, “It would be three days before Marvin’s teammates washed the gasoline and blood out of her hair.” For months thereafter, Marvin lacked physical autonomy as she healed from a host of bone, ligament and nerve wounds.

But after missing the balance of her and Krzyzaniak’s sophomore season, then all of 2015-16, she returned to game shape and saw action in 24 contests this past year.

“With Lisa’s accident, it put a lot of things into perspective,” said Krzyzaniak, who in a future vocation may one day have a role to play in another athlete’s long journey back to game shape. “Most of us had never dealt with something of that magnitude before.

“So to see something like that happen firsthand and to be alongside Lisa for all of her stay in the hospital and then through her very long rehab process, it made us all be able to better see the big picture of life and to know that she was just so lucky to be alive after that.

“But, really, the experiences we were able to have as student-athletes and as teenagers and young adults, that’s just something that you can’t take for granted."

As though any of the Fighting Hawks needed to learn that lesson twice, they were literally taking the ice at Ralph Engelstad Arena for a postseason practice March 29 when the word leaked that their work would be for naught. Menke, the last team captain, subsequently wrote in The Players’ Tribune that she heard the news through classmate Gracen Hirschy, who had learned it via social media.

“It was very abrupt, there was no warning, there was really no indication that something like that was even a possibility,” said Krzyzaniak. “We were a very tight knit group, though, so we had one another to lean on.”

Eight days before posing with Hirschy, Marvin and Menke at their commencement ceremony — her wardrobe uniquely punctuated with an honors’ gold medal — Krzyzaniak had her own social-media missive on the matter. The university’s official Twitter account had quoted President Mark Kennedy as follows: “Our alumni love UND. We are looking to keep it that way.”

Krzyzaniak’s reply: “Really?? Are you sure??”

When she elaborated to Pucks and Rec, she first spoke like the House or Senate leader of an opposition party. Then she switched to a supporting tone for her former teammates who, while she aims to represent UND through a higher than higher education and participation in the five-ring festival, will round out their Division I eligibility on other campuses.

“The president of the university made it very clear that reinstating wasn’t going to happen without an absurdly large amount of money, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us,” she said.

“But it was more just leaning on one another and knowing that there are going to be some tough days, and that no matter where the girls end up, they always have our support to lean back on.”

Not that Krzyzaniak is dipping too broad a brush into the grudge canister. After all, the athletic department and everything it provided in her time put her in a position to become UND’s first representative on the Canadian women’s Olympic team.

However strong that springboard proves in the sporting world, she will have her league-sanctioned cushion to lean back on. Dr. Jeno and company put her on the path to the last academic scholarship anybody will derive directly from playing North Dakota women’s hockey.

“They were nice enough to nominate me for this award,” she said. “To actually be awarded the scholarship was kind of a surprise for me."

Nothing like a pleasant surprise to brighten the picture so soon after a darkening shock.

Meet the Press: Jake Brandt goes the extra miles to insure lasting UND connection

Uh, headphones?

Skates?

A two-billed hat that reads insurance agent by weekday and hockey analyst by weekend?

Jake Brandt never tires of the inevitable banter that comes with plastering his name on his own State Farm insurance office in Brainerd, Minn. In fact, he embraced the 2011 advent of the long-running ad campaign, concomitant with the time he established his office.

“I get a lot of ‘what are you wearing, Jake from State Farm’? questions,” he confessed between chuckles during an exclusive phone chat with Pucks and Recreation.

“I actually enjoy it. I have a lot of fun with it. I have some ‘Jake from State Farm’ T-shirts that I give to a lot of people, and a pair of khakis.

“It’s been something that I’ve used to get some free advertising. It’s great.”

Leave to a former college hockey goaltender to guzzle the nectar of a good-natured occupational jesting. Entering the fraternity of crease custodians has a way of preparing one for that.

It also let Brandt enter a spontaneous side gig at the Midco Sports Network with less anxiety than he might otherwise. A 2005 graduate of the University of North Dakota, he saw action in 60 games for the squadron formerly known as the Fighting Sioux. That included the majority of the workload as a sophomore, then a virtual 50-50 split with Jordan Parise the next season.

Yet despite majoring in communications as an undergraduate, he admits to having no formal broadcasting experience prior to the fall of 2015. His continued involvement in hockey as a Bantam AA coach one state over, not to mention his ties to the proud UND program, were the attraction when Midco needed a new color commentator.

A domino phenomenon in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks helped to precipitate the opportunity as well. When native son Tyler Palmiscno, who overlapped with Brandt at UND for three years, left his post as the East Grand Forks High School boys’ coach, fellow alumnus and EGF athletic director Scott Koberisnki filled his skates.

As it happened, Koberisnki had been complementing play-by-play voice Dan Hammer in the Midco booth. But with ample scheduling conflicts ahead, he unplugged that gig.

“So they kind of brainstormed at UND and thought, ‘Who could we get that would maybe me colorful or would maybe come and enjoy doing this?’” Brandt recalled.

Distance would be the ostensible obstacle to dangling the offer before Brandt. Per Google Maps, the shortest drive from Brandt’s Brainerd office to Ralph Engelstad Arena covers 219 miles and takes an estimated three hours and 34 minutes.

That notwithstanding, Brandt said, “I am very passionate and loyal UND fan, and I thought it would be a great way to get reconnected back in and go to a bunch of games.”

Adjustments and tradeoffs

On no less than a half-dozen occasions in each of the past two seasons, Brandt has abbreviated his Friday at his Brainerd office. Covering a two-game series in Grand Forks entails taking off between 11 and noon, ensuring one hour to kill and check into a neighboring hotel before entering “The Ralph” and full broadcaster’s mode.

Brandt credits the men’s hockey programs sports information contact, Jayson Hajdu, and Grand Forks Herald beat reporter Brad Schlossman with supplying ample information for him to hit his analyst’s pond sprinting. He also cultivates firsthand information through a phone chat with Fighting Hawks bench boss Brad Berry on the Wednesday or Thursday before a home series.

Working with first-year play-by-play announcer Alex Heinert, he proceeds to mold the material into a fast-paced session of on-the-fly puck talk.

“The greatest thing about it is, depending on what happens on the ice, we kind of get paid to talk and have fun with it,” he said.

But there is also a symbiotic dependency between the duo. Heinert, who stepped in when Hammer pursued other opportunities, needed a commentator of Brandt’s background for his first wave of exposure to the UND hockey community.

“I’m always taken aback at how he knows everyone we come across,” Heinert told Pucks and Rec. “Parents of players, old teammates, lifelong UND fans…Simply put, Jake knows everybody and everybody knows Jake, and in most cases, it’s not just on the surface level. To me, that level of investment in a place over nearly two decades is special.

“In terms of hockey sense, Jake’s brilliant. He breaks down what happens in a play, tells you why it happened and usually tells you what could’ve been done to prevent it.

“It’s only his second year in an analyst role, so he’s still working on telling that to the viewers in the most concise manner possible, but it’s still pretty impressive to hear him digest everything’s that happening on the ice and on the benches in real time.”

Brandt, in turn, admits that he is still grasping the finer protocols of live game telecasts.

“It’s way more difficult than I think people think just because when you watch someone, people that have been doing it on the networks make it look so easy because they’re so good at it,” he said.

“The hardest thing is when you have your headset on and they’re talking to you in your ear but you have to continue talking and that was a little bit of a learning curve, just because you’re taught not to talk when someone’s taking to you. You have to listen to what they’re saying, because they’re telling you how time until a commercial break, and not try to lose track of your thought process.”

This season, there is at least no longer the nag of imminent commitments elsewhere. Weather conditions have tended to dictate how soon Brandt reverses his commute. If the forecast prompts caution, he may depart at 2 a.m. Sunday following the second installment of the series. Otherwise, the itinerary calls for a more leisurely return to reality.

He had more to consider, and less time to build up to the Saturday tilt the way one would on the Hockey Night In Canada crew, when he also wore the Brainerd Bantam AA coach’s cap. In 2015-16, he occasionally squeezed a morning game elsewhere in the state or across the border between Parts I and II of the UND weekend. He usually followed his hasty return to Grand Forks with another bolt to another Brainerd commitment before finally hustling home. 

Just like Koberinski the year before him, Brandt had to choose between the coach or commentator bill on his second-job lid.

Unlike Koberinski, he kept the latter. That choice, combined with the grueling commute it entailed, “speaks volumes of the place North Dakota hockey has in his life,” Heinert said.

Blue-paint patriotism

Brandt, originally from Roseau, Minn., still holds a pair of less consuming puck positions in his home state. He sits on the Let’s Play Hockey magazine’s Minnesota Minute Men club, which votes on the scholastic Mr. Hockey and Frank Brimsek Awards. In addition, he keeps his skates sharp for Monday night shifts as a goaltending instructor for various Brainerd teams.

If the Midco job underscores his devotion to his alma mater, the other rink-based gigs he retained for 2016-17 speak to his loyalty to the clan that every former and current goaltender comprises. The Brimsek Award is Minnesota interscholastic hockey’s answer to college hockey’s Mike Richter Award.

Both honors have, at one time, gone to Zane McIntyre (nee Gothberg), a Thief River Falls product and UND alumnus. Brandt had coached McIntyre in the Bantam ranks, but barely missed out on calling any of his college career. McIntyre inked a professional contract before what would have been his senior season in 2015-16, Brandt’s first in the Midco booth.

But that twist also allowed Brandt to witness a storyline that hit home. McIntyre’s exit left a vacancy to be filled by one of three successors who combined for a paltry 43 minutes and 19 seconds of prior collegiate experience.

All of those minutes and seconds belonged to Cam Johnson, but fresh off a draft selection by the Philadelphia Flyers, Matej Tomek was an eye-catching candidate. Lone upperclassman Matt Hrynkiw was raring to finally earn his stripes as well.

But Tomek’s preseason injury bumped Johnson from his presumptive backup post. He would need to shake off an October injury of his own to ultimately wrest the No. 1 job back from Hrynkiw.

By season’s end, after back-to-back Frozen Four semifinal losses failed to consummate McIntyre’s ornate tenure, Johnson was an NCAA champion backstop.

“That was the big question mark coming into last year,” Brandt said. “Zane had left, they needed goaltending and it turned out that with Cam Johnson, there was no falloff from when Zane left.”

He added, “Cam Johnson’s been brilliant this year in my eyes. (The team) just lost a lot (of skaters) from last year. Defensively, they lost a lot as well, so his job is a lot tougher.”

Brandt cited “not being a homer” as the toughest aspect of his current job at Engelstad Arena. While he was referring to the need to tame his built-in loyalty to his alma mater, he could just easily be talking about lifetime goaltender’s fraternity membership.

Putting it another way, he is as much a member of what the Twitterverse dubs #goalienation as he is a part of UND’s all-time roster.

Brandt believes those in UND’s annals got hooked on the hashtag through Karl Goehring, who backstopped the program’s previous national title in 2000 and now volunteers on Berry’s coaching staff. Both masked men, who missed overlapping at the school by one summer, regularly post original stick salutes to their successors or retweet comparable content.

“I think the goalie nation thing is one of those things where everyone is kind of obsessed with being on our own,” Brandt said.

On their own in body, yet unified in spirit. And it is not exclusive to the crest and colors on one’s jersey, either. Case in point: Atte Tolvanen’s recent bid to break Blaine Lacher’s NCAA shutout streak record.

The Northern Michigan contemporary matched one mark of five straight 60-minute goose eggs. But the former Lake Superior State standout’s run of 375:01 without a setback remained on top when Tolvanen’s streak ended at 339:05.

There was added excitement around Grand Forks when Johnson went on his own lengthy tear of perfection last winter. Johnson’s streak of 298:25 enveloped four straight shutouts between December 2015 and January 2016.

In both cases, ex-netminders were hanging on every second, as it meant positive publicity for the position.

 “We all want to see goaltenders succeed and do well and make us proud,” said Brandt. “So the fact that when you wear the pads and you’ve been a part of that, you can appreciate when you see a goaltender who is having success.

“You make sure to watch it just because you gravitate towards goaltenders and success. We pay attention to the success that they have. The goalie nation thing is just that, we are a little bit single out, people tease us and joke about us. We kind of embrace it a little bit. We’re a little different and a little odd because we take great pride in the position that we play.”

Only the best

Despite the experiential discrepancies between his past and present roles in “The Ralph,” Brandt insists that playing net “was a more stressful job.” But having now catered to a home arena mass and a home television audience for roughly the same number of games, he appreciates the sustained pleasure of catering to Fighting Hawks (nee Sioux) fanatics.

Brandt likens the scrutiny of the Grand Forks fans to those of the Montreal Canadiens in that they “expect nothing but the best, and if you’re not, they let you know a little bit about it.”

Given that Montreal’s Bell Centre boasts the largest seating capacity in the NHL, the comparison has credibility. Engelstad Arena is an anomalous mansion of a college hockey venue that accommodates 11,643 spectators.

Those who have a share of the power over what happens between the boards aim to sustain a high volume and positive tone for two-plus hours. If all goes according to their plan, they will literally set off fireworks at the final horn.

For those working the booth, the task is merely sustaining concentration and talking over the clamor. No worries about talking down to the viewer in this market.

“When we do our broadcasts, we know we’re going out to a lot of people just because of the fan base that UND does have,” Brandt said. “It’s not like we are telling the audience anything they don’t know because they are so knowledgeable, so there’s no way to go sugarcoat it when they’re playing poorly, because they know.”

Because of that, not unlike the skaters who service them, Hawks fans will pounce on any elevated challenge beyond their turf. Besides a slew of Frozen Four appearances in recent years, they have flocked to NCHC road games and regular-season neutral-site contests in other time zones.

Madison Square Garden hosted three games hosting a combined six college hockey programs this season. Of those six teams, North Dakota made the longest trip. Yet the crowd of 11,348 for its bout with Boston College eclipsed the 10,148 that took in New Hampshire-Cornell and dwarfed the 5,002 that turned out for Wisconsin-Ohio State.

Early this February, tickets went on sale for an Oct. 27, 2018 date with the Minnesota Gophers at Las Vegas’ Orleans Arena. With another 20 months left before that game, all 7,773 seats have already been claimed.

“Not many college programs can go out to New York and pack as many people in a Madison Square Garden venue and have it be a success like UND can,” Brandt said. “Not many people can go down to Vegas and literally sell out a 7,500-seat building in seconds on Ticketmaster, and that’s because of the Champions Club and the fan base.”

One’s objectivity is perfectly intact after one makes that statement. Still, as is relatively common among regional network color commentators, the inner ex-player is not always so inner.

Then again, that is what draws a man of Brandt’s ilk to a job of this nature. It will take more than a semimonthly seven-hour round trip to keep him away from Engelstad’s allure.

“We’re very proud at UND of what we put out on the ice as a product,” Brandt said. “We feel we have the best coaching staff in the country, we have the best facilities in the country, we have the best trainers in the country, we have the best sports information directors in the country, the best beat writers in our college area.”

“We gravitate toward the team,” he added. “We put a lot of pressure on the UND hockey team, but in saying that, we recruit guys that we feel can go in and have success at that level.

“I say ‘we’ (even though) I’m not a part of the team, but I’m a part of the past and tradition, and I’m one of the most loyal alums that there are, and there’s a lot of them out there.”

As far as Heinert is concerned, in the words of Prymaat Conehead, that assessment “sounds most appropriate.”

“Of course, if he wasn’t on the air, he’d be in Ralph Engelstad Arena for the majority of these games as a supporter,” Heinert said. “But we’re certainly happy with his choice to remain in the broadcast booth. He’s a great combination of a former player, proud alumnus, knowledgeable coach and passionate fan, and it shows in his call on game days.”