"It's Always Fun Playing State. We're Expecting a War."
On the familiarity and ferocity of Michigan and Michigan State on ice at their best, and a quick word on the start of a busy month for U-M WoHo
On October 6, 2001, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University men’s hockey teams met under the open air at Spartan Stadium for a game dubbed the Cold War.
Twenty years on from that inaugural outdoor game, “Cold War” had a different connotation for the rivalry, Michigan’s dominance dampening the feud’s furious intensity. Last January, the Wolverines won 7–1 in East Lansing, completing a run of fifteen wins in seventeen tries against the Spartans.
The following night at Yost Ice Arena, MSU overturned a 4–1 deficit for a 7–5 win and snapped alive for four straight wins in the match-up, including their first win at the Duel in the D since 2016 and culminating in a 5–4 overtime triumph at Munn Ice Arena for the Big Ten Championship last March. In two months, Michigan State turned up the heat on the Wolverines and seized command.
However, when the NCAA Tournament bracket was revealed, what had seemed a decisive shift in the balance of power became instead only set-up for its biggest ever stage. At a Regional Final in Maryland Heights, MO, U-M and State met for the 343rd time. It was just the second time the game was played outside the state of Michigan and for the very first time as part of the NCAA Tournament.
Eight days after the Spartans’ triumph in East Lansing, Michigan pranced to a 5–2 victory and its third straight Frozen Four. The Wolverines enjoyed the last laugh, but there could be no doubt: Michigan and Michigan State raged hot again.
Fifth-year Wolverine forward Philippe Lapointe has played in this game fifteen times, including all six meetings last year. He won the first he played 9–0. As a sophomore, he was part of the 8–0 win with which U-M swept MSU out of the Big Ten playoffs. For the Wolverines, that win was the apotheosis of their dominance, and for the Spartans, it was the humiliation that inspired change—the arrival of coach Adam Nightingale and a new era for a proud program.
Over the last two-and-a-half seasons, Lapointe has seen Nightingale reawaken State into a national power, and after last year’s highs and lows, he sees a muddy picture. “Both teams remember pain from last season,” Lapointe said after Tuesday’s practice, ahead of this weekends home-and-home between the two sworn enemies. “They took a championship away from us, and we ended their season, so there’s a lot of animosity between us, and I’m smiling right now because I’m just so excited. You guys are getting me juiced up already and it’s Tuesday.”
The proximity between delight and suffering is the magic of the rivalry at its best. Now, between last year’s back-and-forth drama and both teams heading into the weekend ranked in the top ten, the rivalry’s hardly been hotter.
“It’s always fun playing State,” Lapointe says. “We’re expecting a war.” Yet alongside that militaristic vision, he also likens a game against the Spartans to an elementary school “tussle.” The rivalry evokes a tribalism tantamount to war, yet there is also something childish in the antipathy, only possible between foes proximate enough as to roam the same imagined schoolyard. Now, with both teams desperate to beat the other back to the sport’s pinnacle, the familiarity and the ferocity perpetuate themselves with each meeting.
For Michigan coach Brandon Naurato, State’s revival under Nightingale “just makes [the rivalry] that much better because it matters.” To reduce its significance to the cliché of “bragging rights” is to diminish the real stakes. “We couldn’t care less about [bragging rights],” he said Tuesday. “It’s about Pairwise, it’s about Big Ten standings, it’s about beating the best competition knowing that you should see their best. Every kid from Michigan, it’s Michigan or Michigan State. It’s recruiting. It’s alumni. It’s important.”
Naurato believes the relevance of the recent history to this weekend is as an archive, “to show the new guys and remind the guys that are coming back how they play, how we have to play, showing ways where they’ve had success and then where we’ve had success.” Per Lapointe, his coach’s message throughout the week has called for a delicate calibration, meeting the rivalry’s intensity without becoming distracted by it: “It’s playing with emotion but not playing emotional.”
The Wolverine coach suggests the emotion of the first five minutes tonight at Yost will do more to condition the rest of the weekend than any pre-game preparation could hope to. “We can talk to them about anything we want, and you spend five hours to have a three-minute conversation, and you hope that the messaging is right to get them in the right mental headspace,” Naurato said. “And then you hope they are to perform, and then really, that’s the first five minutes. And then the game happens, and Is it going our way? Is it not? How do you respond? Is there confidence to respond when it’s not going your way? Can you flip a switch? That’s hard. When it is going your way, how do you keep it going? I just think the mental side and confidence is so massive in sports.”
“The energy in the rink—It’s like the Frozen Four or the Big Ten Tournament—the energy in the rink is different for these games,” Naurato says, and, to sum it all up, “The emotional swings in college sports [are] what makes it awesome, but not for coaches.”
State enters the weekend having played its way into the nation’s number one ranking. That’s an accolade the Spartans earned last year as well, but this year brings a new marker of Nightingale's progress to the rivalry. This weekend’s two biggest stars will both wear green and white: brash sniper Isaac Howard, the nation’s leading scorer, and prodigious goaltender Trey Augustine, fresh off his second World Junior gold medal.
Howard tops the country with eighteen goals and thirty-three points. Those eighteen goals are more than the junior scored in his freshman and sophomore seasons combined (fourteen). Augustine boasts a 1.97 goals against average and .931 save percentage. While Augustine’s imperiousness provides an unmatched fail-safe should errors in front of him befall MSU, Howard embodies the lethal transition attack—fast, direct, sharp-shooting—that accentuates the importance of what were already U-M’s core tenets for the season: defending and puck management. The Wolverines’ “track or die” mantra goes doubly against Howard and company.
“For us to have success…the focus is always defending,” asserted Naurato, making plain the respect cutting through the animosity in his description of the Spartans’ game and Michigan’s resulting game plan. “We have to defend. We have to check. We take pride in that stuff from a mentality standpoint. When you create turnovers or you have the puck on your stick, then we can make the next play. They’re really good off transition, and they make inside plays. They’re a good hockey team. They play hockey the right way.”
Senior forward Mark Estapa distilled the weekend’s challenge to something simple: “This is my last time playing MSU in my college career, along with the seniors and fifth years, so gotta make it count.” If recent history is any indicator, the Wolverines and Spartans’ four presently scheduled match-ups over the remainder of the season will bring joy and pain for Estapa and his team. The question left to answer is in what measures.
WoHo Begins Busy January
We’ll close this week with a quick recap of the start to 2025 for the University of Michigan women’s hockey team.
U-M opened its new year last weekend at Yost Ice Arena with a split against Penn State. For the series, the Wolverines were without their delegation bound for the World University Games in Italy, including coach Jenna Trubiano, goaltender Sandrine Ponnath, defender Keegan Gustafson, and forwards Julia Lindahl, Kelsey Swanson, Lucy Hanson, and Emily Maliszewski.
On Saturday night, a twenty-one-save performance from Avery Schiff back-stopped Michigan to a 5–1 victory, with Katie Cummings scoring a pair of goals. Then, Sunday, the Nittany Lions countered with 3–2 bounce back victory at Yost. The Wolverines are on the road this weekend, taking on McKendree and Maryville.
Meanwhile, the Team USA crew completed the group stage of the World University Games Thursday, with a decisive 5–0 thrashing of Kazakhstan. Julia Lindahl scored in the victory. The Americans dropped their first two games of the tournament (6–3 to Czechia and 6–0 to Japan). Those two losses took Team USA out of consideration for the gold medal, but that doesn’t mean its tournament is done. Instead, the U.S. will keep playing in the “placement games,” beginning today with a match-up against Team Great Britain.
Thanks to Michigan Athletics for this week’s preview image. Please also check out THN.com/Detroit for daily Detroit Red Wings coverage.