The Road to the Frozen Four had more than just the play­ers along for the ride. Coaches, team staff, fans and press tagged along to cap­ture and memo­ri­al­ize live events for future recollection.

For the past two sea­sons, I’ve shot nearly every home hockey game at our inti­mate Ewigleben Arena in Big Rapids. With nearly 2,500 seats, every fan remains close to the action.

But as the team pro­gressed fur­ther and fur­ther into the post-season, the venues kept get­ting larger and larger.

The Midwest Regionals were held at the Resch Center in Green Bay, where FSU defeated both Denver and Cornell in 2–1 vic­to­ries. After those eight-hour bus rides to and from the land of the Cheeseheads, it started to really set in how immense and amaz­ing this sea­son had been.

Riding on the fan bus to Green Bay were mainly alumni and locals whose diehard con­tin­ual sup­port brought them across Lake Michigan.

The ride down to Tampa for the Frozen Four was filled with alumni and locals, but with a much greater turnout of stu­dents who made the 26-hour trek south­ward to the Sunshine State.

The venue in Tampa Bay was the Tampa Bay Times Forum. It was filled with over 18,000 fans for both the semi­fi­nals and the cham­pi­onship games. During both games, thun­der­ous chants sup­port­ing the Bulldogs seemed to pos­sess more weight, giv­ing me goose­bumps and tem­porar­ily tak­ing my focus off the job at hand.

The mere pres­ence of Bulldog hockey at such a national scale was notice­able by the ques­tions directed toward me by strangers who would fol­low up my response of my pub­li­ca­tion with ques­tions to intrigue.

They were sim­ply try­ing to under­stand how a small-town Big Rapids school could go fur­ther than the nor­mal sta­ples of the Frozen Four: mas­sive schools like Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin and the likes.

And although FSU couldn’t take down the jug­ger­nauts of col­lege hockey Boston College, the sea­son that FSU put together makes me hon­ored to be able to tag along for the ride.

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