With his team trailing top-seeded and forever-loathed Minnesota 3-0 with less than eight minutes to play in the second period of its WCHA Final Five semifinal game last week, North Dakota goaltender Aaron Dell instigated a tide-turning sequence few, if any, had ever witnessed.
The echoes of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” had barely ceased to reverberate throughout St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center when Dell thwarted consecutive quality scoring efforts by Minnesota’s Mark Alt, Nick Bjugstad and Kyle Rau to maintain what, at the time, was still believed by most to be an insurmountable deficit.