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"Finally, we were back."

By Karl Schuettler, 03/22/22, 7:00AM CDT

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The famed Karl East's final musings on the 2022 State Tournament, with platitudes and pageantry aplenty.

2022 BHS Podcast State Tourney Recap

Finally, we were back. 

Back in St. Paul, back at the X, back in concourses strewn with gear from every corner of the state. Back in the flesh, back in the usual haunts, back to groaning at the same old ads and swimming through the hormonal clouds that hang in the air. Back from reliance on live streams or online rabbit holes, back from half-empty arenas that stripped away all the trappings that made Minnesota high school hockey something that transcends the sport in any other place. Back where we belong.

What that meant wasn’t the same for everyone. In one case, it meant being back after a very long time away: Minneapolis, with a public school entrant in the Tourney for the first time in 28 years, painted the lower bowl white for its evening quarterfinal, jerseys and letter jackets from Washburn and West and Edison dotting the concourse, the pageantry upstaged only by Joe Dziedzic’s hat. But tradition is useless if it cannot sweep up the newcomers too, and the energy was contagious in the town down by the casino. Prior Lake packed the stands the next two nights, infected with Tourney fever, its student sections raising the bar for all the rest. Other schools responded in kind, and even the off-color chants rolling down from the upper deck dredged up nothing but nostalgia. Everything was right with the world.


After a year of stunted crowds due to COVID-19 restrictions, fans of all ages showed up en masse for the 2022 state tournaments.

Both classes offered some tantalizing storylines. Not in a decade have we neutrals been so hungry for a certain Class A final, and despite a plucky push by Mahtomedi, it arrived as scheduled. Hermantown and Warroad were the favorites from start to finish this season, their skaters on a different level from the rest. For a period they traded blows, but Zam Plante then found another level, and the Warriors, gassed from a short bench through overtime the day before, slowly lost their steam. Hermantown did what it has not always done and locked down defensively, returning the title to the outskirts of Duluth for the first time in five years. Class A’s behemoth reigns supreme.

Class AA began with a Bumpy start for Cretin-Derham Hall, a running time stunner in a wide open field. The deep, defensive old guard of Edina and Hill-Murray, the safe picks for pundits before it all began, had their armor pierced by high-flying precision attacks. A Tourney regular possessed of a newfound flair also faltered; Moorhead surged early in its quarterfinal with Andover, but its vaunted offense could not finish the deal. That left two teams with incisive top lines, Maple Grove power and Andover elusiveness, paired up with formidable defenses and rocks in goal.

The AA final between the Crimson and the Huskies was the pinnacle of entertainment in my time watching high school hockey. The bedlam of the 2021 Maple Grove-Eden Prairie semifinal remains shrouded in mystery, with only a few fans on hand; Duluth East-Eden Prairie in 2011 and Hill-Minnetonka in 2010 and the great Edina-Duluth East battles of the past 12 years were nervy, heavyweight slugfests. This one was just pure racehorse hockey, two even teams going blow for blow, oozing with quality chances. One claimed the momentum, the other race back, and the grin of delight was fixed on my face. I could have stayed all night. But end it must, and Logan Gravink did the honors with a fine, clean finish. His Huskies may not have been the most talented team in the field, but they had the fortitude to run the gauntlet, and they just never quit. Mark Manney, one of the true good people of high school hockey and the shepherd of an emerging powerhouse, earned his place in the annals, and I suspect he will be back.


Cayden Casey celebrates after scoring for Andover in the Huskies' state championship win over Maple Grove.

There was no shortage of individual glory in this Tourney. Alex Bump stole the headlines on Thursday with his five-goal eruption, his every touch of the puck eliciting the shrill chorus of a high school crowd; over three days, Josh Giuliani exceeded his output, with some help from the assist man in chief, Landen Gunderson. Danny Nelson was a human bowling ball, while Gavyn Thoreson’s effortless flights up and down the ice set up Cayden Casey snipes, and Weston Knox was a fortress on the Andover blue line. Warroad’s Jayson Shaugabay redefined both beautiful play and an understanding of reasonable ice time for a forward, while a phalanx of foam hammers waved for each Hampton Slukynsky save. The Plante brothers, Zam and Max, elevated Hermantown to a new level of dominance. In net, Ben Dardis fell short of a second title but cemented his reputation as the greatest high school goaltender of his generation. 

Maple Grove’s Chayton Fischer grabbed the cameras for his hair and his celly, but will live longer in my mind as the last kid on the ice as the lights went down on Saturday night, outlasting the last of the reveling Huskies and remaining as the Xcel Energy Center crews began to rip the ads out of the boards and set the stage for a Wild game the following night. Finally, Luke Margeneau came to collect him, but not before he, too, took a long, hard look around the great arena, their high school dream at an end. Every year that poignant moment comes like clockwork, a shared lineage of commitment to a cause, the expense of every last drop of effort and emotion in the name of a game and for a team, that unifying force that can still break down an obsession with one’s own career and development that sometimes tears locker rooms apart. High school hockey may never have been pure but it still aspires to be, and there is something of great value in that pursuit.


Prior Lake's Alex Bump scored five goals in the Lakers' quarterfinal win over Cretin-Derham Hall.

And that same hunger, of course, is what draws so many of us back. Old friends and new drift on through, pieces of the Youth Hockey Hub puzzle or just the familiar faces from each successive year. Tuesday night Tourney Eve at Danny’s, and fun with the old Eveleth crew. Some Prior Lake pregames, the annual Minnetonka dinner, and a series of run-ins with Warroad friends; “you just feel at home with them,” says Tony, and indeed I do. My seatmates Eric and Kara and their friends, the chill fellow lovers of the entire spectacle; the Ryans and Kleins, hockey friends now down many years; Derek and his son Cooper, growing up before my very eyes. Too many to list, some sought out, some chance encounters, all gracious and part of this ever-growing hockey family, sometimes squabbling but like those high school teammates too united in a shared fondness to let it ruin anything.

The Tourney bookends these strange past two years. The world shut down the week after Hill’s 2020 title, and now, in 2022, it brought a resurgence of the human spirit that was all too fleeting in the interim. It felt right, a ritual restored, another bath in a fountain of youth. Even as I age it feels more and more like a safe berth, a home for life. The Tourney, to borrow some words from the critic Anthony Lane, “may spill over with sauce and silliness, but that is the privilege of the young…it is the job of the adult artist to dig back into that time, and to unearth, from the ridiculous, the shards of a broken sublime.”


The Warroad faithful showed up in droves to support their Warriors in St. Paul.

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