Hey Yellowdog,
In regard to your comments about UND's "25 year old Canadian players", they don't have any. When UND won the National Championship in '97, Sid Hartman (THE worst sportswriter at a major daily in the country) and "Dark Star" made numerous similar comments. As it would turn out, if either of those morons had simply looked at rosters, they would have seen that not only did the Gophers have the two oldest players in the conference that year (Steve DeBus and Dan Woog), but they had the oldest average age of any team in the conference. The "25 year old Canadians" complaint is a familiar one from Gopher fans that obviously don't know the game.
Furthermore, no one made the Gophers recruit only Minnesota players for all those years, so the UND "advantage" you speak of was the Gophers' own doing. You're right that a team comprised totally of North Dakota players couldn't compete, but the state has a population of 640,000 (less than the Twin Cities metro area alone), so I think it's fair to say that this insight wasn't too mind-blowing.
Lastly, there's no way to know whether the Gophers would have won more titles if they'd recruited out of state. The fact is they didn't, and they've won four. If Ed Belfour had stayed at UND more than a year and sophomore Hobey Baker winner Tony Hrkac hadn't left, UND may have won two or three more in a row after '87, but guess what, that didn't happen. Throughout the Doug Woog era, the U of M got to the postseason and choked, plain and simple, so let's not guess what might have happened IF they'd recruited out-of-state for the past twenty years, and simply remember what did happen. Grant Potulny of GRAND FORKS, ND scored two goals in the National Semifinals, and the game winner in the title game, and after waiting 23 years, the Gophers FINALLY got #4.
