Big Red Get Third Straight Crack at Frozen Four
by Jane McNally/CHN Reporter
TOLEDO, Ohio After 30 years of coaching, you’d think Cornell’s Mike Schafer had seen it all.
The stage presented to him Thursday was one he’d seen before — Schafer has coached 15 teams to the NCAA Tournament, and had won 10 of 14 first round games, many of them as the lower seed.
But Thursday dealt something different, much like how the entire 2024-25 season has.
“This season has fed me everything that I could not imagine,” Schafer said. “As a coach, you’ve been in the business for 39 years, and you think you’ve seen everything.”
Minutes before, Schafer saw his season extend by at least another game, when Sullivan Mack scored with 10 seconds left on the power play to stun Michigan State, the second-overall seed in the NCAA Tournament.
Down 3-2 heading into the final period against the Toledo regional’s top team — Michigan State, the pinnacle of consistency all year — Schafer gave his team a talk.
At the root of it was a past experience — Schafer has many of those. In particular, he cited a game that occurred 20 years ago to the day. Cornell was taking a different Big Ten powerhouse — Ohio State, whose assistant coach was current Cornell associate Casey Jones — in a regional semifinal game. Cornell trailed 2-0.
And Cornell, anchored by a 34-save performance by goaltender David McKee, stormed back to win that game back in 2005. That’s what Schafer told his 2024-25 team about between the second and third period on Thursday night.
“We definitely needed a wake up call after the second period,” Sullivan Mack said. “And the coaching staff kind of came in [and] Schafer came in and told us: ‘Let’s get it going here.’ He talked about that Ohio State game back in the day, and I think that that kind of got us going.”
It started when Ryan Walsh scored his second of the game, pounding home a juicy rebound from Michigan State’s blue-chip goaltender Trey Augustine. Then Jack O’Leary drew a penalty late in the game against one of Michigan’s top penalty killers.
Cornell’s power play was anemic all season, but it now has huge goals in two straight weekends. Last week, it came in overtime of the ECAC semifinal against Quinnipiac. This time, on the only power-play of the game, it…
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