Roman blog: Gophers won't have home-ice advantage at X, Lucia says

http://www.startribune.com/sports/blogs/143430006.html

Go Gophers!!

This doesn't seem like the normal sandbagging to try to downplay expectations. He acknowledges that we will have "home-crowd" advantage, but makes a very fair point about being on a smaller sheet when we have a team built to play well on the Olympic sized ice.

We have two potential matchups with a great deal of history together...A graphic on last friday's game showed the all-time post-season matchup record between ND and MN as 19-19. The Whioux are now one-up on us.

MN is currently 11-12 against BU ( I forget the number of ties). Historically, these are some extraordinarily evenly matched squads. I'm excited to watch some great post-season hockey again, with an opportunity to even the score with BU. The last few years have just not felt right as a Gopher fan. It is a real kick in the pants to see our boys playing in late March again. Here's hoping for a meaningful early April tournament to end the season!

Go Gophers!

If we get the sioux they do bring alot of fans so that would be a true neutral site, maybe a few more gopher fans because of location, but the Sioux will probably be 7,000 deep