1. Congrats to all the tourny winners and NCAA seeds. 2. Double-strength congrats to Brown University. From 1-25 to an NCAA appearance within the tenure of one class. Warning: do not take this team lightly! cf. Harvard's follies. 3. Good luck to the Three Musketeers, Clarkson, Brown (and yes, even Hahvahd). I believe this is the first time since the inception of Hockey East that the ECAC has had more seeds than they. It was certainly deserved - too bad RPI got the shaft; after this weekend, they would have been mad enough to beat anybody. Way early predicition: next year will be all their's. 4. A word on the HE semis on Friday. OK, several words. Did anyone out there notice anything about the officiating in the BU-UNH game? Like, there wasn't any! I had the rare (at least I hope it will be rare) privilege of watching a tournament game with no rooting interest, and I thought the refs abdicated all responsibility from the opening face-off to the horrendous no calls on successive, flagrant, delay-of-game plays by BU down the stretch. In normal Very Badly Officiated Games, you get the following: A slugs B, ref C is oblivious, so there's no call. Then B slugs A in retaliation, and C wakes up and whistles B. That's normal referee ineptitude (a.k.a. a day at the office with John Gallagher), and I can accept it. On this night, A would slug B (now remember, I couldn't care less who won this game, but A seemed to correspond to BU most of the night.) Ref C, Gravelles specifically, watches passively. Then B retaliates, perhaps even more flagrantly, C's still watching intently - and doing nothing! This wasn't clean checking - it was hacking, holding - in short, the Tie Domi charm school. It was ridiculous. The game just got worse and worse, and if it weren't for the tremendous performaces by Abel and the-BU-goalie-who-isn't-Cashman-darn-I-forget, it might have been one of the worst games I've seen all year. And remember, I've seen spectacular efforts like Cornell-Union! Anyway, it was the worst officiated game by someone other than Gallagher that I've seen in a while. 5. Radio announcers who aren't awful - what a revelation! Anyone in the Boston area should try this one night next year. Listen to the Harvard announcers for as long as you can take it (average time, 2 minutes), then switch over to the BU announcers. The latter are intelligent, professional, in short everything that the former are not. A real pleasure to listen to - if they're out there on the net somewhere, thanks for a good call in the championship game. 6. What is it with the Crimson, anyway? What have they won, 6 regular season titles in the last 8 years. And how many ECAC titles - one! The announcers were complaining incestantly about bad ice on Saturday (basically, blaming the loss to Brown on it). Did anyone out at Placid notice that the ice was especially terrible? Good luck and good hockey to all of you whose teams are still in it. Look for the Cornell sweater at Worcester. I'm just scouting the competition for next year! Greg Somerville Let's Go Red! OK, maybe '95...