The ride from Dartmouth to Princeton is one of the longest in ECAC Hockey.
It’s certainly the longest commute between hockey-playing members of the conference’s six-team Ivy League contingent. The drive is nearly a straight shot traversing the north-south poles at either end of the league’s geographic footprint, but the 315 miles between New Hampshire’s rural outpost along the Vermont border and its chic New Jersey counterpart is just as long as Brown’s travel to the North Country schools at Clarkson and St. Lawrence.
The bus ride is five-odd hours without traffic, but not even the bumper-to-bumper threat surrounding a trip through New York City would have ruined the Big Green’s commute home after their 5-1 win over their Ancient Eight rivals clinched a six-point weekend and the team’s best start in nearly 80 years at 4-0-0.
“We have gotten some excellent goaltending, some timely goals, and our power play’s been good through four games,” said Dartmouth coach Reid Cashman. “That’s kind of been the biggest part of getting our results, but the lead-up, there are a lot of things to the lead-up that have made it better than the actual results, and it’s been a little bit of [everything] that’s built a good start for us.”
Last month opened a vacuum near the top of ECAC’s traditional power structure, but nobody expected Dartmouth to fill the void even after the Big Green finished last season with a first-round bye. Persistent questions about how they intended to turn ties into wins raised eyebrows whenever discussion about the top four began, and analysts believed the team would backslide since the curtain of uncertainty had been fully removed.
The abstract reasons overshadowed the truth about Dartmouth’s roster, which returned nearly every major part to a team that received significant buy-in over the past three years. Having been forged together by the resurgent run to a first-round bye, the opening game against Harvard felt more like a continuation than a restart for the Big Green, and the momentum from last season’s trip to Lake Placid’s ECAC semifinal likewise carried over to the 2-1 win over the Crimson and the 5-2 win over Stonehill.
“Our guys came into this season in really good shape,” said Cashman. “We did an excellent job in the offseason, and I think we had continuity for the first time as a staff. As far as our seniors, this is the first senior class that’s had four years in the program, and we were able to hit the ground running in September, both from a structural standpoint and a cultural standpoint.”
Seizing the electrical charge from those first two games propelled the Big Green to its first road sweep over Quinnipiac and Princeton since realignment created their travel partnership in 2005-06. Unranked at the start of the weekend, Dartmouth actually had to make the longer trip to Princeton on the second night after starting the weekend at the league’s preeminent and perennial powerhouse.
For its part, Quinnipiac long served as Dartmouth’s house of horrors, but the Big Green vanquished their first set of ghosts with a 4-2 victory. Having gone scoreless through the first period, the team scored twice across a five-minute stretch of the second period after Alex Krause and Sean Chisholm scored, and with four minutes remaining in the third period, Nikita Nikora was able to find John Fusco for a neat little wrist shot in the slot.
Less than a minute later, CJ Foley scored an empty-net goal to take home the two-goal win, which counted as Dartmouth’s first victory over the Bobcats in Connecticut in 18 years and the first win over Quinnipiac since a Nov. 2018 game at home.
The win pushed Dartmouth to its best start since the late-1970s before more history books fodder fell victim to a 5-1 win on Saturday night. Having already played with bursting confidence, the Big Green raced out to a 4-0 lead in the second period after Nikora, Chisholm and Hayden Stavroff added their own goals to extend a one-goal advantage in the first.
An extra goal in the third from Steven Townley put the host Tigers on their heels before a late goal avoided the shutout, but the victory established the best start to a Dartmouth season since Edward Jeremiah’s Indians went 13-10-1 during the third season of Ivy League play, a full four years before ECAC formed its hockey league in 1961.
“A big part of what we do at Dartmouth is try to give the players a really strong foundation with really strong habits,” said Cashman. “The guys have to go play hockey. We can’t tell them what to do in every situation, the game is too fast, but we can really develop habits of the foundation. I think there’s been growth. There’s been individual growth within the guys, and I think there’s been growth as a team.
“Adding [assistant coach] Byron Pool has been incredible because he’s been a fresh set of eyes while not changing what we do. There’s been the timing of him coming into our program that’s helped us really well.”
It’s still early enough in the season that rankings and Pairwise notes don’t mean much, but the Big Green entered the national poll for the first time in five years this week when voters moved them to No. 17 in the USCHO.com rankings. They remain one of three undefeated teams but sit third in the Pairwise Rankings – for what it’s worth, at least – with one of those unbeaten teams sitting at No. 1 with defending national champion Denver.
Dartmouth returns to action this week when it hosts No. 6 Cornell on Friday and Colgate on Saturday. A potentially titanic game against No. 2 Boston College lurks in two weeks when the Big Green visit the Eagles before the first semester ends with games against Vermont, St. Lawrence, Clarkson and New Hampshire.
