ITHACA, N.Y. – The closer you get to a men's hockey game at Cornell, the more rigid the schedule generally gets. Early-week practice days have some fluidity, late-week practices start to get a little more formulaic, and the game-day routine? You can set your watch to it.
 
But last weekend was different. Lynah Rink was more abuzz than usual. Between both Cornell hockey programs, there were three home games in one weekend. There was a film crew from Toronto in town to shoot a documentary about Lynah. It was Harvard's annual visit. And if that wasn't enough, members of the 1970 NCAA champion men's hockey team – revered for its unmatched accomplishment of winning a national title with an undefeated, untied season – was reuniting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the perfect season.
 
So on Saturday morning, about 12 hours after the Big Red wrapped up a come-from-behind 3-2 victory over Dartmouth, team breakfast was a little different. Returning members of the 1970 squad were invited to join the current version of the team to connect over team breakfast. It was an occasion worth breaking routine for.
 
"It was good to see all the personalities. There were some serious guys, there were some jokesters. It was a good combination of guys," junior forward Brenden Locke said.
 
Mostly, it was an opportunity for story-telling. Hockey has changed a lot in 50 years, so current players enjoyed hearing how it used to be. Senior defenseman Yanni Kaldis was a freshman during the 1967 championship team's reunion three years ago, and he remembered how they talked about how the team would all spend the night before home games in bunk beds at the Cornell boathouse. Sure enough, the John Collyer, Class of 1917, Boathouse and Doris B. Robison Boathouse were the first stop on the 1970 team's tour last weekend – a chance to reminisce about bonding in unusual quarters for hockey players, even if it looked drastically different after its $8 million facelift nine years ago.
 
But there was a lot more wisdom to share, especially since this year's Big Red is enjoying a level of success that few have seen. For starters, Cornell continues to lead the nation in winning percentage. And the last time it had lost one or fewer through its first 19 games of the season? It was 1970 – when "fewer" lasted all the way to the national championship.
 
"They had some pretty good stories and points of emphasis," Locke said. "The biggest thing I got from them was to just take it day-by-day – not focusing on winning a championship, but more enjoying the process and realizing you're never going to be with this team again."
 
Junior forward Morgan Barron said he was surprised to hear that the 1969-70 season wasn't exactly one that came with managing high expectations from the start.
 
"Some of the guys at our table said they got halfway through the year and didn't even really think of it as anything special was going on – they were just going and playing, and they happened to be winning the games," Barron said. "They said it probably wasn't until the last few games that they realized that something special could be happening. So it was pretty cool to get that perception, just because you come into a season with different expectations all the time."
 
The reunion weekend for the 1970 team concluded with an on-ice ceremony during the first intermission of Saturday's rivalry game against Harvard. Despite the presentation happening in the middle of an intermission, the stands remained nearly at capacity with an attentive and appreciative audience. It was a fitting end for the team's reunion – and perhaps a fitting weekend for this year's team to see at this particular point in time.

Around The League

•  Four of the nation's six leagues use three-on-three overtimes and shootouts to combat the much-maligned tie these day, with ECAC Hockey remaining one of the two holdouts. (Quick trivia: What's the other league that's still OK with ties? Answer in Part 2 of Off The Crossbar, which will be posted on Friday). But a shootout led to a Cornell "loss" in the championship game of the Fortress Invitational earlier this month, and another shootout decided the annual Mayor's Cup game last Saturday between Union and Rensselaer. Union won it last year; RPI won it this year.
 
"The debate about shootouts," RPI coach Dave Smith told the Times Union, with a smile. "Last year, you lose in the shootout and you don't win the Mayor's Cup and it's so down. It's exciting to win it. So, we win it this year and you see the jubilation and, right now, I am definitely in favor of shootouts. Last year, not so much."
 
•  ECAC Hockey preseason polls are never spot on, which makes it entertaining to compare predictions to reality by season's end. Inevitably, it's pretty easy to pick out the biggest "over-achiever" and the biggest "under-achiever". The league season is only 58% complete, but the clear favorite to be the former is Colgate. The Raiders were picked to finish 11th by the coaches, but they enter this weekend tied for the third-best winning percentage.

The X-factor appears to be depth. Colgate's main contributors have been that way since their freshman years (think forward Bobby McMann, defenseman Nick Austin, among others), but the Raiders have two sophomore goaltenders sharing time and two freshmen among their top six on the blue line. The mixed bag was on display Friday, when Colgate tied visiting Harvard, 3-3.
 
"I think our young guys played like young guys," Raiders coach Don Vaughan told College Hockey News. "As we get deeper in the season, it becomes a sprint now. They are still playing well and playing critical minutes for us."
 
•  The inaugural Connecticut Ice event last weekend \pitted all four of the Nutmeg State's teams against each other in a two-day tournament. A quick death for such an event would be recurring dominance from one or two of the programs involved. The logical culprits would be Yale and Quinnipiac, who have far better recent track records than UConn or Sacred Heart. But it was in fact the Pioneers that emerged as the victor in Year 1, racking up 10 goals over the weekend in victories over Yale and Quinnipiac.

Alumni Update

•  Cole Bardreau '15 continues to be a bit of a folk hero for New York Islanders fans. It's understandable, given that he scored his first NHL goal on a penalty shot during an Islanders hot streak that has waned since Bardreau's return to the AHL's Bridgeport Sound Tigers. Oddly enough, Bardreau scored quicker in the NHL this year than he did in the AHL. He finally broke through with Bridgeport over the weekend.
 
•  Goaltender Hunter Shepard made his 105th consecutive start for Minnesota Duluth on Saturday, which broke an NCAA record previously held by Ben Scrivens '10. UMD reached out to Scrivens to see if he would be willing to record a little congratulatory video that the department could put on the video board at Shepard's record-breaking game. Scrivens graciously complied – but managed to sneak in a parting shot, boasting about his alma mater.
 
"You've had an illustrious career; two national championships already. Good luck the rest of the way, good luck in the rest of your career – but to get your third, you've got to go through the #1 team in the country right now," Scrivens said, pointing to the Cornell sweatshirt he adorned. "Good luck."
 
Off The Crossbar is a weekly-ish notebook about the Cornell men's hockey team written by assistant director of athletic communications Brandon Thomas, who is in his ninth season as his office's primary contact for the team following a stint of a few years as the team's beat writer at The Ithaca Journal and a few years as an observer from Section D. But he wrote a lot this week, so the second part of this week's Off The Crossbar will be published Friday, Jan. 31. Thomas can be reached at brandon@cornell.edu.