Everybody remembers the 2022 Mason Cup Championship. Mike Hastings couldn’t forget it if he tried.
"Whether it's fans or friends, somebody you met for the first time," the former Minnesota State coach said, "people will tell you about that game. It's an experience that is once in a lifetime."
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On March 19, 2022, Bemidji State played in a college hockey game against the Mavericks that, for better or worse, garnered the nation's attention.
"That game," BSU head coach Tom Serratore said, "that play, that outcome and that whole ordeal was flat-out bizarre."
The Beavers needed an upset over their most hated rival, No. 2 Minnesota State, in the Central Collegiate Hockey Association's first-ever Mason Cup championship game to advance to the NCAA Tournament.
The game went to overtime. Three minutes in, the Mavericks scored.
On a partial breakaway, then-freshman Josh Groll made a right-to-left move across the crease and wrapped the puck around then-freshman goaltender Mattias Sholl’s skate.
Or so he thought.
As Sholl pushed off his left skate to the right goalpost, the net briefly popped up off the ice. Groll’s shot slid under the outside of the net and in.
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It happened so quickly that the replay officials didn’t catch it during the initial review.
In the scenes that followed — the moment from phantom goal to the night’s second game-winner — the CCHA catapulted into the center of the hockey world. What began as a night aimed to crown a champion abruptly transformed into an evening marred with controversy.
It’s also a night that spawned misconceptions. The Pioneer got to the bottom of what happened in those 79 minutes that led to the CCHA restarting its tournament-championship game, more than an hour after it ended.
And it all started in the town of Bovey, Minnesota.
8:35 p.m.
Groll hurled his gloves and his stick and was greeted by a mob of teammates in the corner of the rink to the right of Sholl.
Off-ice officials reviewed the goal near the Zamboni entrance at the Mayo Clinic Health and System Event Center and confirmed the call on the ice.
As the two teams lined up to shake hands, the Minnesota State broadcast on FloHockey began showing replays of the goal.
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Meanwhile, in Bovey, population 814, a Bemidji State student was watching the stream.
“I was sitting there in front of my TV, and it was a great hockey game,” Bay Zuehlke said. “I saw them enter the zone, and when the guy was coming toward the net, the net popped up a little bit and the puck disappeared. I knew it when it happened that it didn’t go in. I mean, it did go in, but it went underneath the net.”
Zuehlke took out his phone and recorded a video of the puck going in under the net. He had two longtime friends on the team, Donte Lawson and Alex Adams.
“I knew Alex Adams wouldn’t answer his phone because he was playing, so I sent it to Donte,” Zuehlke said. “They kept showing the replay, and probably a minute after they scored I was screaming at Donte in the video.”
Lawson, a freshman at the time, was a healthy scratch. He received the video while the players were lining their respective blue lines for the Mason Cup trophy presentation.
“It was all on camera,” Lawson said. “Bay was sitting criss-cross applesauce two feet away from his TV. He was screaming and swearing at the TV telling me it wasn’t a goal.”
8:38 p.m.
The BSU non-dressers were sitting in a media area during the game. Once the first celebration commenced, they slowly made their way to the locker room to start packing up the bus.
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On the walk down, Lawson showed Zuehlke’s video to junior forward Brad Belisle.
Lawson described Belisle as a “glue guy,” which led to their collective decision to have Belisle bring the damning video to the coaching staff.
“Donny is a little shy and he was only a freshman, and I was a junior,” Belisle said. “I was like, ‘Give me the phone, I have nothing to lose.’ But even I’m scared at that point. I have to stop Tom or our season is over.”
Belisle admitted he was wary of getting an earful from the coaching staff for even showing the video.
“Out of the guys who weren’t dressed that night, I felt like I was the guy to handle that,” Belisle continued. “It didn’t matter to me if I had to be the one to tell him. If I got yelled at, oh well – wouldn’t have been the first time. I’ll take it, I’ll wear it.
“In that 10-foot walk to show Tom, I thought that maybe I should show (assistant coach Travis Winter) first. But I just went right to the old man.”
Serratore was the last representative for Bemidji State to leave the ice. He was met by Belisle and Lawson in the tunnel outside of the locker room.
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“I pulled him aside and said, ‘Hey, Tom, you have to see this,” Belisle said. “He looks at me like I have three heads. He takes the phone, and he’s got this gunslinger pose with his hands around his pockets. He took whatever phone I gave him and just went bananas.”
8:50 p.m.
After making a pit stop to the coach’s room, Serratore ran back on the ice to find CCHA commissioner Don Lucia and Hastings.
“They were doing their thing while Kato was celebrating,” Serratore said. “I go, ‘Don, Hasty, look at this. I don’t think that’s a freaking goal.’ Don looks at me and goes, ‘You have got to be kidding me.’”
Serratore was once again met with the three-headed look from Hastings.
“I didn’t think much of it at first,” Hastings said. “But the respect I have for Tommy, he just had this look on his face. Part of me wanted to say, ‘Well, good luck with that.’ All of a sudden, things just started happening.”
Lucia, a first-year collegiate commissioner, now had a decision to make.
“I got my feet thrown in the fire, and it’s all Tom’s fault,” Lucia joked. “All indications were nothing was wrong, everything was fine. All of a sudden, here’s Tom walking across the ice. That’s when the festivities really began.”
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Some Bemidji State players, who were divided into separate locker rooms by forward and defense, had already accepted their fate.
“I remember Brad Johnson had all of his gear off and was in the shower already,” forward Jere Vaisanen said.
Belisle went into the forward room and told them it may not be over.
"Owen Sillinger, a great person and a great friend, gave me a look and said, 'We lost, that's enough.' I was like, 'But Owen, we didn't, maybe.' It was such an awkward experience."
Other players held out hope, including Mankato native Kyle Looft.
“We went back into the locker room, and I think some guys saw the video and some guys didn’t,” Looft said. “I remember Shollsy going in and breaking his stick over the wall. We were defeated. We thought our season was over. For some, we thought careers were over. Some guys were undressed already. I didn’t take off anything but my helmet and gloves because I saw the video.”
Serratore’s optimism for a restart was nowhere to be found after passing off the video to Lucia.
“We left the ice, and once you leave the ice it’s over,” Serratore said. “It’s over, baby. Stick a freaking fork in us. We’re done.”
8:56 p.m.
Shane Frederick, formerly of the Mankato Free Press, was covering the game as a freelancer for The Rink Live. He found out about the non-goal when he entered the press conference room.
“I remember Dean Thibodeau, the assistant commissioner at the time, said to us that they were reviewing the goal,” Frederick said. “I’m like, ‘What? How are they reviewing the goal?’ I packed up my stuff and ran back to the arena, and I ran into a few people still around the arena. I saw my wife and some people she was talking to and told them not to go anywhere.”
Frederick tweeted the goal was under review, which was confirmed by the CCHA’s Twitter feed four minutes later at 9 p.m.
Lucia pulled the off-ice officials aside and looked at the goal in the review area near the Zamboni doors. Serratore and Hastings retreated back to their locker rooms.
“I’ll never forget walking into the forwards room, and Tom was sitting on one of the benches,” BSU equipment manager Toby Palmiscno said. “If you didn’t know any better, you would've thought he was a player. Guys were just throwing questions at him, and he didn’t have any answers.
“It got to a point where he kind of chuckled. At first, you’re sad about the loss. Then you get angry after seeing the goal because you don’t think they’ll ever let you back on the ice. After a while, it kind of turns comical.”
After looking it over with the officials, Lucia walked to the Minnesota State coaches' room.
“Luc wanted me and Tommy to come outside of the rooms and talk about it,” Hastings said. “I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. The only thing I can’t have is putting me and Tommy against each other here. That’s not right.’ Don said no, he just wanted to get (the call) right.”
Before Hastings met with Serratore and Lucia again, he received a text from a former captain who became an assistant coach at Northeastern.
Minnesota State was already in the NCAA Tournament as the No. 2 overall seed, regardless of whether it won or lost the Mason Cup. Michigan Tech was also in, but Bemidji State was not. The Beavers needed to win the Mason Cup to go to the dance.
“Jerry Keefe, who was my captain in Omaha in the USHL, was coaching at Northeastern,” Hastings said. “I get in the room and get a text from Keefer saying, ‘Thanks, appreciate it.’ We go through that whole thing and I told him not to start booking hotels yet.”
If BSU had won, Northeastern was the next team out of at-large contention for the NCAA Tournament. Northeastern athletic director Jim Madigan was not available for comment on whether or not the school would’ve taken legal action against the CCHA for restarting the game if BSU had won.
“Would people have challenged the decision? Possibly,” Lucia said. “My response to them would’ve been, 'You should’ve won your game. It’s not my fault. Win the game and it’s not a problem.' Bemidji didn’t lose the game in that scenario, even though people thought they did. They didn’t truly lose the game. I can’t imagine having your career ended when it shouldn’t have.”
9:05 p.m.
Lucia pulled Serratore and Hastings into a huddle with officials and other league representatives around the review station. The photographer’s table stood 15 feet away from the meeting.
Former Pioneer photographer Jillian (Gandsey) Johnson was sitting at the table. She snapped a photo that circulated nationwide.
“They pulled it up on that TV and started looking at it,” Johnson said. “Everyone there was kind of trying to discreetly snap photos of it. We were all standing right there, and nobody said we couldn’t. We heard it all, everything they said.”
Belisle was also lurking around the huddle.
“The moment where I thought I might’ve done something was when I saw James Murray,” Belisle said. “He runs Everything College Hockey and he’s a Bemidji guy. I told him what happened, and after the last word came out of my mouth, he wasn’t interested in me anymore. He went right to the phone and to Twitter.”
9:09 p.m.
With the sold-out crowd down to just hundreds left in the building, Mayo Clinic HSEC staff got back on the ice to start doing maintenance in anticipation of the game restarting, despite not being given the official word yet.
Meanwhile, most fans had left the building, including Jack and Maggi Hittinger. The two formerly worked at the Pioneer before moving to the Metro area. They attended the 2022 Mason Cup as fans.
“As soon as Mankato scored, we peaced out of there right away,” Maggi said. “We went to Pub 500 and got a booth. They had the game on the TVs, though, and we thought it was weird it was still playing because it was like 20 minutes after the trophy presentation.”
MSU play-by-play broadcaster Don Westphal caught wind of the review shortly after an on-air interview with Hastings concluded. Westpahl said the broadcast was minutes away from ending before they were told about the review.
“We don’t have a spotter or anything at games with us,” Westpahl said. “I remember my broadcast partner was saying his final thoughts and he was getting ready to kick it to me to close the broadcast. Then we hear in our headset, ‘Hold on a second, the goal is under review.’ We never went off the air, we never took a commercial break.”
The production for the broadcast takes place at Bethany Lutheran College, several miles away from the arena. It’s a student-run production that chose not to go to commercial out of fear of missing the ruling in real time.
That decision informed fans who were at the game and migrated to the nearby bars that overtime was, indeed, not over yet.
“It was clear they were looking at something,” Jack said. “Everybody in the bar thought it was weird, and there were fans of both teams there. I think the bartender turned the volume up or something, but I turned on (the BSU radio broadcast).”
Brain Schultz, the 20-year play-by-play voice for the Beavers, also never went off the air. From his vantage point, he could see the commotion taking place in the tunnel.
“I wanted to hear what Schultzie was saying,” Jack said. “He knew better what was going on than the bar TVs. I think that’s when we decided to go back.”
9:20 p.m.
In the conversations between Serratore, Hastings and Lucia, the three agreed the only correct course of action was to do something unprecedented.
“Tommy and I are looking at each other, then Don says to us, ‘What do we do?’ Hastings said. “I kind of said, ‘Well, let’s put some time back on the clock and drop the puck.’”
Exactly 20 minutes after the announcement of the review, media members in attendance tweeted that the goal was disallowed and the game would resume.
The CCHA put a 20-minute countdown on the scoreboard, with five of those minutes reserved for a second on-ice warmup.
Back at Pub 500, all of the people who had shuffled into the bar were encouraged to go back to the arena. Pub 500 co-owner Bailee Whiteman said fans could wait to pay their existing tabs after the restart if needed.
“Yeah, I mean, there’s risk in it, but it was a huge game,” Whiteman said. “We’ve worked with MSU forever and the hockey team is huge for us. I think they appreciate us too, so why not let them go and come back?”
Arena security was also in unfamiliar territory. With no way to take tickets again, there was no way to assign seats for the people who came back or the people who showed up for the first time that night.
“I know a lot of people go to our entertainment district downtown, so we put on our socials that the game was going to resume and to come back,” said Eric Jones, the co-director of sales and marketing at Mayo Clinic HSEC. “We did a real loose security check, just making sure they weren’t bringing in contraband. There were probably some who came in that never had a ticket.”
As for the Minnesota State players, who had already been given the trophy and the accompanying championship apparel, there wasn’t much pushback toward the decision to restart the game.
“We had a good group, and I’m not just saying it to say it,” then-senior Jack McNeely said. “We had our championship hats and stuff, and we all threw them in the middle. We told ourselves to go earn it again. We had a mature group, and you can’t really control that kind of stuff. That’s what made us a good team, as cliche as it is.”
Looft called it the hardest situation he’s had to handle mentally in sports, going from watching your season end to getting a second chance to make the NCAA Tournament.
“There are times where I sit there and question if I handled that right with my team,” Serratore said. “Were they too up? Should I approach that differently? I just said, ‘Boys, you got a new life. Let’s go get it done.’ But was there a way I could’ve controlled or harnessed their emotions any more? I think about that sometimes. I’m not sure what I’d do if I could do that over again.”
Lucia would also like one do-over from that night.
“I would’ve had an announcement made to the fans,” Lucia said. “I had to make such a quick decision, and it’s not something where you get 10-15 minutes to figure out what to do. You get seconds. With my background as a coach, I thought about the seniors. It bothered me that careers would end on a goal that wasn’t a goal.”
The CCHA released a statement on its social media channels explaining the ruling at 9:26 p.m. Part of the statement read: “Additional TV production camera angles made available to the officials provided conclusive evidence that the goal net was elevated and the puck entered underneath the frame. The play on the ice will be overturned and ruled no goal. The ice will be resurfaced, followed by a five-minute warmup. The game clock will be set to 16:58 remaining in overtime.”
9:42 p.m.
By the time the officials returned to the ice, the building had reached about a third of its capacity. However, the fans in attendance for both teams made their voices heard.
“The boo they got was something special,” Palmiscno said. “It was a sound I hadn’t heard in a while, maybe ever. But it wasn’t their fault.”
Maggi said people did not sit in their original seats.
“It was probably sold out in the beginning, and it wasn’t even half full when people came back. … It was definitely weird, but it was classic Beaverness to have it all restart and get all optimistic.”
Looft had dozens of family and friends in attendance, and most of them stuck around for the second act.
“It was insane,” Looft said. “I’ve never had a feeling like that on the ice ever. It didn’t even feel like we were playing a game and it was the biggest game of the year. … You’re about as warm as you could get, it’s just mentally getting back into it if you can. You’re just trying to pull yourself together. It’s the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me in sports.”
Because the goaltenders switch ends for overtime, Minnesota State players warmed up on the visiting side of the rink.
“We did our huddle around the away net, never did that on that side before,” McNeely said. “It was all weird, hard to explain.”
9:54 p.m.
After 79 minutes of not playing hockey, McNeely received a pass at the top of the faceoff circles and sniped home the actual overtime winner.
It took just three minutes and nine seconds of game time to determine a true champion after the game resumed.
“I’m just glad it happened early,” McNeely said. “I’m not a goal scorer, but it’s cool to get that one in your last home game. I was just happy we won. It was just different. Kudos to the people who were there and came back.”
Belisle said: “God, it was so quick how it ended after all of that. You can only smile at that point. We joke to this day about how we were the only team to lose the same championship twice in one night, and nobody can take that away from us. We never won one, but we lost two in one night.”
For Lucia, it was a brief moment of relief knowing the result stayed the same, avoiding any national controversy for the CCHA getting a third team into the tournament on a restarted game.
“That arena has been a house of horrors for me,” Lucia quipped. “There’s been these crazy finishes, and I think we had three straight in that building. Between the Bemidji game in my first year to the one with Michigan Tech for the MacNaughton Cup to the playoffs that year where Minnesota State pulled their goalie and scored two goals and won in overtime, I’ve aged in dog years in that building.”
The aftermath
Serratore, Hastings and McNeely say that the 2022 Mason Cup was “bizarre,” “talked about” and a “once in a lifetime” experience. But the immediate fallout was damage control for the CCHA.
“Right after the game was over, I went to the press conference and explained the decision making,” Lucia said. “You have to take responsibility and communicate that with everybody. Some aren’t going to agree, which is fine. That’s the nature of sports. But you have to make a decision and live with it and move on. I feel very comfortable with the decision we made.”
Lucia said that night stuck with him long into the early hours of the morning.
“I remember writing a letter that night to the athletic directors and the presidents of the schools explaining what happened,” he added. “It became a national story, and it wasn’t just a hockey story. It got millions of views on Twitter.
“But what’s the saying? Any publicity is good publicity or something? We certainly got our name out there.”
In the following weeks, the NCAA clarified its rule book to state that once officials left the ice, the game was officially over and couldn’t be restarted.
“A lot of credit has to go to Don Lucia,” Frederick said. “Whether you agree or disagree with the decision, he sat down and took the bullets. I asked him a lot of questions, everybody in the room asked him a lot of questions. It was so unprecedented and possibly not even allowable. But he sat there and took it.”
Three years removed from those unfathomable 79 minutes in Mankato, the people involved look back fondly on that night, grateful to be a part of one of the craziest occurrences in the history of college hockey.
“Because the stakes were so high, nationally, it was just such a moment,” Frederick said. “It’s one of the things I love about college hockey. There’s little moments like that in history that people are connected to, and I think that game stands up there. It was two rivals, a championship was on the line. People will remember that for a long time.”
Zuehlke still thinks about his role in it and laughs.
“There’s no possible way that actually happened,” he said. “I think about it now when Donte comes back every summer. I tell him I’m the reason they played an extra two minutes. If we’re sitting around a bonfire in the summertime and that game comes up, I’m always like, ‘Yeah, that was me, and it was awesome.’”
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