On The Whole, I Would Rather Be In Detroit

Today marks the Mason Cup Final, the trophy given to the champion of the tournament held by the Central Collegiate Hockey Association, the CCHA.  It is a bittersweet one because this will be the very last Mason Cup Final ever.  After Sunday afternoon's game between Notre Dame and Michigan, the CCHA will cease to exist.

There has been a lot of talk of how realignment has ravaged conferences and rivalries because of the thirst for money made off of college football, but there is a similar, if separate, sea change that has happened in hockey.  It's a regional sport and much fewer programs make money off of it, but it's a niche sport that has a devoted following from their fanbases, many of whom grew up watching, if not playing, hockey.

The CCHA began in 1971, grew to have up to a dozen teams (including big-time programs Michigan, Michigan St. and Notre Dame), and had ten NCAA championships from its ranks.  But then a man by the name of Tom Pegula, an oil magnate, retired, cashed in his stock, and decided to change the world by fully vesting a varsity hockey team for his alma mater, Penn St. (as well as buy the Buffalo Sabers).

That triggered a wave of conference jumping that, for its size, is just as seismic as all the moves in football, although the changes will happen orderly and at once.  The Nittany Lions became the sixth team from the Big Ten Conference to sponsor hockey (which officially began life as a varsity program this year), the conference, either because the member schools agreed to it or because it just makes sense, now said it had enough teams to create a Big Ten Conference for hockey.  That means that Minnesota and Wisconsin would leave the WCHA, where they had been for decades, and the Wolverines, Spartans and Buckeyes will ditch the CCHA after, respectively, 32, 32 and 40 (non-consecutive) years.

Since all the big programs are now joining together, all the little, non-brand names in college sports (though not necessarily in hockey) didn't have the huge schools that would visit and pique the interest of the casual fans to spend money to go see them.  That left a next tier of eight successful, profitable programs to ditch the W- and C-CHAs to form their own conference, the absolutely bland-sounding National Collegiate Hockey Conference, or NCHC.  Two of those eight come from the CCHA, Miami and Western Michigan.

With all those defections, the CCHA, which had been at 11 teams since the 2010-1 season, was now down to six.  And when Notre Dame decided to bolt for Hockey East, there were too few teams to keep a CCHA going.  The desperate measure was for the CCHA to poach the remaining four schools from the WCHA.  But, under circumstances I still don't know, the deal was for the last CCHA teams to jump ship for the WCHA and for the CCHA, which was the conference for the Great Lakes region of the United States and was based in Detroit, to shut down at the end of this season.

I say all of this because that -- the history, the cirumstances of the conference's death -- is the reason I wanted to get a credential and cover the Mason Cup Semifinals and Final being held at the Motor City's Joe Louis Arena Saturday and Sunday.  I wanted to be there for a sports organization's last breaths.  You don't see the end of a conference all that often, and I had planned to get a feel for the nostalgia and sentimentality, any emotions this last hurrah might trigger, even (if I were ambitious) to see the nuts and bolts that goes into euthanizing a sports conference.

But I couldn't.  Because, as I had said in some previous blog posts, I didn't have the money.  Man, I keep going back to my flu biller position, which I thought I would go back to after the New Year.  If my supervisor had kept his word, I would have been there for up to six more weeks.  I calculated that would be about $2,100 -- more than enough to pay for my car repairs and still have enough to shell out a few hundred dollars for a bus trip, hotel and car to stay in D-Town for a few days (and maybe go to one or two of the area's notorious stripclubs, too).  But I wasn't hired back, I have had to starve my checking account just to keep out with my credit card bills (which I'm not doing), and I didn't think it was feasible to go.  That my test reader job began Friday, finally giving me a line of work, sealed my decision to pass up marking a piece of history with my own eyes.

So instead of taking the Megabus to and from there, seeing a part of the United States still dealing with winter, and then seeing what has happened to a once proud, now decrepit city, I had to occupy my time here.  It wasn't all bad; I started my job Friday; today (Saturday) I helped out with my annual day of charity work, chatted up a few members of the alumni club, went to a roller derby bout (well, let me take that back; I got pissed off because the Minnesota RollerGirls, supposedly ranked eighth in the country, got the ever-loving shit kicked out of them by the [Austin] Texas Roller Derby Texecutioners by, like, 300-150 -- yeah, they got doubled up at home.  It was so bad that I had to leave with about 20 minutes left in the game; I chose not to be witness to such an embarrassing slaughter); and tomorrow (Sunday) I will camp outside Ridder Arena and grovel for a ticket to see the women's college hockey final and see, possibly, the U. win their second straight national title and go undefeated in the process.

So you see it's not all a waste.  But paraphrasing W.C. Fields, on the whole, I would rather be in Detroit.