Does Penn State’s Frozen Four berth mean the hockey program has arrived?

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — This is not a normal place for a Cinderella to reside. A sprawling campus home to 40,000-plus undergrads. An arena named after and funded by an alumnus, Terry Pegula, who made a fortune in oil and gas and gave $102 million to build a 6,000-seat hockey heaven.

Across the street is the 15,000-seat Bryce Jordan Center and, of course, Beaver Stadium, which seats more than 100,000 and is currently undergoing a $700 million facelift.

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It is absurd to paint Penn State as David in just about every scenario, but everything about its run to the final weekend of the college hockey season is absurd. The Nittany Lions will play Thursday night in their first Frozen Four in the program’s 13th season in Division I, and if you flash back to the first weekend of January, that idea seems preposterous.

Penn State was winless in its first nine Big Ten games coming off a 15-18-3 season. PairWise, a ranking system used to predict the 16-team NCAA Tournament field, ranked the Nittany Lions 33rd among the 64 Division I teams as the calendar turned. Penn State took one of two on the road at Notre Dame to start the new year, then returned home in front of the Roar Zone student section and split a two-game set with the No. 1 team in the country, Michigan State.

The tide turned. Penn State closed the season by winning 12 of its final 14 regular-season games and, after a semifinal exit from the Big Ten tournament, the Nittany Lions grabbed the last at-large spot in the NCAA field. They were placed in the Allentown region, a gift. They smacked fourth-ranked Maine, 5-1, before knocking off No. 7 Connecticut, 3-2, in an overtime thriller to reach the Frozen Four in St. Louis.

Penn State meets No. 8 Boston University — making its 25th Frozen Four appearance — Thursday night (8:30, ESPN2) for a chance to play in Saturday’s national championship, and it’s all pretty unbelievable.

“There was a time in our season where people left us for dead,” said coach Guy Gadowsky, who took the job in 2011, one year before the jump to Division I. “Everybody talks a good game, but for them to actually do it and then come out right now, going to the Frozen Four, is really remarkable.”

How does a season turn? How do you root out the negativity of a winless start to Big Ten play?

Alternate captain Carson Dyck, a senior forward, had an idea.

“We were all at a point where we were like, ‘This is our last go at this,’ ” said fifth-year forward Tyler Paquette, a Collegeville native. “All we want to do is win. He gathered us.”

The plan was for the leadership group to meet with every player individually because “not everyone is the same,” Paquette said.

“If we meet with everyone individually, we can kind of go through and see what’s working and what we think they can work on,” senior forward Dylan Lugris said.

This is a close-knit hockey team that enjoys coming to Pegula Ice Arena. The Nittany Lions play darts and ping-pong, and Paquette dominates the chessboard on the rare occasions he has any takers. But it is a young team. There are seven seniors and 14 underclassmen.

The personalized approach to meeting as a team worked. That’s not to say Penn State’s turnaround was all magic and no making of its own. The Nittany Lions are led by sophomore forward Aiden Fink, who was a Hobey Baker award candidate and has 23 goals and 30 assists in 39 games. His 53 points are four off the nation’s leader. They boast six players with 30 or more points, and a goalie, Arsenii Sergeev, who transferred in this season from UConn and is having his best collegiate season.

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Paquette came back to use his extra year of eligibility provided by the pandemic. He and Jimmy Dowd Jr., a Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., native, are the lone fifth-years on the team. They had two things left on their checklist, Paquette said, and one of them has been marked as accomplished. The other is two wins away.

Gadowsky has been coaching for nearly 30 years, in Division I since coaching Alaska-Fairbanks beginning in 1999 before leading the program at Princeton beginning in 2004. He has been around the block, as they say, but he said this week that one of the biggest lessons he’ll take with him in his coaching career and beyond was one he learned this year.

“The way that Dyck, [captain Simon] Mack, and the leadership group kept everyone from being negative,” Gadowsky said. “He absolutely refused to let anyone be negative.”

The defining characteristics of this team are perseverance and resilience, Gadowsky said.

“People applaud athletes and people in general when they stay positive,” he said. “It’s a rarity when there’s rock bottom to step up. … That’s what this team did.

“When you haven’t won in your first nine Big Ten games, and you’re on the road against an awesome team, that’s not an easy task. This team has been used to some pretty extreme challenges. When you fight hard and get through them and come out on the other side, it gives you confidence.”

Confidence and Penn State hockey haven’t been synonymous. When Gadowsky took over the program and prepared it to enter the new world of Division I hockey, he heard similar sentiments from recruits. They loved the idea of Penn State, a big school in the Big Ten, and all the fun that comes with it.

“‘It’s so much fun. I’d love to go there. I just don’t want to lose for four years.’ We heard that a lot. We really did,” Gadowsky said. “And it was written that Penn State would not win a Big Ten game in three years. There’s not a lot of high-end recruits that want to be a part of that.”

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They proved to be a bit wrong, however. While Penn State went 3-16-1 in its first season in the Big Ten, the Nittany Lions won the conference’s tournament in their fifth year in Division I and came one game short of reaching the Frozen Four in 2016-17. The culture builders helped Penn State establish itself, and Gadowsky credited a few of them earlier this week, including Aston’s Ricky DeRosa and Glen Mills’ David Thompson.

“They weren’t intimidated by playing the monsters of college hockey,” Gadowsky said.

Paquette was a high schooler during those early years. He never associated Penn State with hockey, he said, but many of his Collegeville neighbors were Penn State grads. He committed in 2016, with Penn State having its most successful season. The pitch was easy. His parents and friends could come see him play, and the facilities were great.

“You see the outreach and the support,” Paquette said. “I’m glad to be a part of it.”

The winning, though, didn’t follow. There will always be a you-never-know factor from the canceled 2020 NCAA Tournament. Penn State was one of the best teams in the country. But out of the pandemic, Penn State had consecutive losing seasons. The Nittany Lions had a winning record in 2022-23 and made another NCAA Tournament, but went 15-18-3 last season. Gadowsky’s Big Ten winning percentage at Penn State is .453 over the last 12 years.

This, a run to the Frozen Four and all the attention that comes with it, was part of Pegula’s vision when he gave what then was the largest gift in Penn State history to kick-start this program. Penn State wanted to win. But more than that it also wanted to build and grow a hockey community in Pennsylvania. To that end, Penn State has been a booming success. Gadowsky remembered his sons playing on youth teams that barely had enough players. Now, the youth program at Pegula Ice Arena might be maxed out.

Those seeds have been growing for quite a while. But is the Frozen Four Penn State hockey’s real arrival?

“It’s certainly a really good accomplishment,” Gadowsky said. “To get to the Frozen Four in college hockey is very, very difficult. There are so many just great, traditional successful programs. It is very, very difficult.

“Have we arrived? I don’t necessarily think that it’s the results, whether you’ve arrived.”

Gadowsky pointed to a recent home opener. The team came out of the tunnel at Pegula and was greeted by a “packed and jamming” student section.

“I think that’s when we arrived,” Gadowsky said. “I think there’s a lot of people that looked at that and said, Penn State is going to get there, it was just a matter of time.”

What’s next? College sports have been upended and there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the future. It remains to be seen what revenue sharing looks like at Penn State and other places. Penn State, of course, will be sending a large majority of its revenue share to the football program. Where is hockey in the pecking order? We’ll see, and college hockey is filled with teams that don’t have football programs and may not even opt into the House vs. NCAA settlement when it comes to revenue sharing.

It’s unclear if the ice will be tilted in any direction. But there will be a chain reaction of sorts from Penn State’s Frozen Four appearance.

Gadowsky still remembers those early recruiting calls well. Penn State was a place where you could have fun and get a great education, but you couldn’t win hockey games.

“I think the ripple effect might be that we won’t hear that very much anymore,” he said.