When the University of Denver Pioneers’ 2005 NCAA hockey championship banner was unfurled and raised into a place of honor in the Magness Arena rafters Saturday night, it immediately became musty with tradition.
It joined six other national championship banners, dating to 1958, when the DU Arena was a suitably creaky war surplus building moved over from Idaho, the Pioneers were the biggest athletic act in town and the fans came in furs, coats, ties and top hats.
Back then, most of the Pioneers players came from Western Canada, minus most of their teeth, and soon-to-be legendary coach Murray Armstrong exhorted them to help replace the graduated defensemen on their trips home for the summer.
To many college students nowadays, The Beatles not only were popular in another century, the group might as well be from another age – the Paleozoic – and they’re still trying to figure out what their parents saw in that old-time group, Aerosmith. To them, “Rain Man” is an ancient movie. George Herbert Walker Bush is more the president’s gray-haired father and a pal of that other old guy, Bill Clinton, than he is a former president.
Yet when you play hockey at DU, you immediately become aware you’re part of a tradition. And you don’t wince about the past, other than perhaps laughing a bit about hairstyles, uniforms or equipment of another era. You allow it to envelop you.
“Right when you come in, you learn,” sophomore goaltender Peter Mannino said with a smile. “The seniors MAKE you learn.”
It is more about a feeling and a pride than it is a required course of study and awareness of details. The Pioneers probably couldn’t get a passing grade if a zealous history professor put together a multiple-choice test about years and names and statistics, but they quickly come to understand that though Magness Arena is new, it has echoes. And maybe even ghosts.
“We try to connect the past with the present here,” DU coach George Gwozdecky said.
“When you have that connection in the Pioneer hockey family between the guys 10 years ago and 50 years ago and one year ago, it really means an awful lot. The power you can develop through that family atmosphere can be very magical.”
When the Pioneers raised the banner before their 4-3 victory over Michigan Tech on Saturday night before DU’s 23rd consecutive sellout crowd, they were both commemorating the second of back-to-back national championships, and also their adding to a proud tradition.
“You feel the emotion of the accomplishment of last year and you also feel the emotion of being a Pioneer,” the Pioneers’ senior co-captain, Californian Gabe Gauthier, said of the ceremony. “It’s a big bundle of tradition and a lot of emotion when you play here. Every time I look up there, I get a little emotional because every team up there worked hard, and no matter what the year was, they had the same kind of experience.”
That involves not just highlighting the seven national championship teams and the long list of All-Americans and NHL players who passed through DU, but also the men who didn’t, figuratively speaking, make it into the rafters.
Many of them went on to productive professional lives outside of hockey, and they also check back in with the Pioneers.
“We have alumni coming in and telling us about their experiences,” Gauthier said. “It’s fun, not only when they’re from four or five years ago, but also from the ’50s. We really soak it up. We know that eventually we’re going to be the same way, coming back, and it’s a snowball effect.”
So when Gerry Powers, the standout goalie on the Pioneers’ 1969 national championship team that also included Keith Magnuson and Craig Patrick, was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame on Saturday afternoon, he emotionally paid tribute to the past – but also emphasized that he still felt a part of the program today.
Powers, who outdueled Cornell’s Ken Dryden in the 1969 national championship game, feels an attachment not just to other DU goalies who immediately followed him, including current associate athletic director Ron Grahame, but with Mannino and his teammates.
That kind of bond doesn’t ever get old.
Musty maybe, but not old.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-820-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com.
