With all home teams winning Sunday, Maine's chances for an NCAA bid have
increased substantially!

In fact, it will now take a very unlikely set of events to keep Maine
from an NCAA bid.

It will take Maine losing to BC, Colgate or Vermont winning the ECACHL
and Nebraska-Omaha beating Ohio State for the CCHA title to cause Maine
to be squeezed out. Of course those ECACHL teams must get by Harvard and
Cornell (ranked 6th & 5th nationally), and in the CCHA Nebraska-Omaha
must first dispose of Michigan State and Michigan (18th and 6th
nationally). This would mean auto-bids to 4 teams below Maine in PWR.
Maine would be tied for 12th with Michigan, but would lose the
comparison with Michigan and the last at-large bid, due to 0.002 in RPI.

There may be other scenarios where Maine doesn't go, but I can't find them.

Warning: These calculations don't include the NCAA's RPI bonus "for
quality wins", since the bonus values are not published by the NCAA.

So, if Maine was a probable or likely (my words) NCAA tournament
selection after Saturday's win over UMass-Lowell, they are now not a
lock, but a prohibitive favorite to be selected!

By the way, Hockey East has announced:

HOCKEY EAST SEMIFINAL PAIRINGS SET </presarch/0305/mar13mf.html>
The top four seeds in the Hockey East tournament advanced to next
weekend’s semifinals, setting up what promises to be a choice
double-header on Friday, featuring top seed Boston College taking on No.
4 seed Maine at 5:00 p.m., followed by No. 2 Boston University vs. No. 3
New Hampshire at 8:00 p.m. Both games will be televised live on the New
England Sports Network (NESN). The winners advance to Saturday’s
championship game, which is scheduled for a 7:00 p.m. faceoff and will
also be televised live by NESN.

cheers, wayne