Behind the scenes of the Rochester Grizzlies run to the Fraser Cup

May 16—Noah Roitman felt two years of emotion bubble to the surface on March 27.

The Rochester Grizzlies veteran stood on the bench next to his defensive partner, Per Waage, as the clock ticked down under 90 seconds, then under 60 at the St. Peters Rec-Plex in suburban St. Louis.

The second-year North American 3 Hockey League veterans smiled and hugged one another, and their surrounding teammates. Roitman couldn't find words at the moment. Waage did his best to come up with some.

"He just said 'We did it! I can't thank you enough for what you've done for me and the team! We did it!'" Roitman recalled.

A year earlier, Roitman's season ended on the same sheet of ice, when his Oklahoma City team lost to the North Iowa Bulls in the NA3HL national semifinals. A day later, North Iowa beat Rochester to win the 2021 Fraser Cup championship.

So if anyone could understand how badly the Grizzlies' veterans and coaches wanted redemption, it was Roitman.

Those memories made the moment this time all the more surreal for Roitman, an Inver Grove Heights native. He and Waage were celebrating checking the final box in a long list of boxes that were created at the start of the 2021-22 season, some seven months prior. As the minutes turned into seconds and the clock at the Rec-Plex showed all zeros, Roitman and his Grizzlies teammates poured onto the ice, their long journey to a national championship of their own finally complete.

With a 4-0 win against Granite City, the Grizzlies became the Fraser Cup champions.

"It was just a very heartwarming feeling," said Roitman, who had six goals and 26 assists in 47 games this season. "Through all the ups and downs of getting traded last year, then getting cut from a team and the way last season ended ... the last 60-90 seconds standing with Per on the bench together it was like 'wow! This is reality!'"

A day earlier, Roitman and Waage were standing on the same bench, Roitman struggling a bit to control his excitement as the Grizzlies closed out a convincing 4-1 win against the Helena (Mont.) Bighorns in the national semifinals.

Grizzlies coach Chris Ratzloff appreciated Roitman's enthusiasm, but he had to quickly remind his star blue-liner that the mission was not yet accomplished.

"I went up and down the bench with maybe a minute left in that game and said 'hey, this isn't why we're here. This is just another game. Handle it like we always do,'" Ratzloff said. "I said 'Roits, settle down, we have one more to go,' and he was there last year and lost in the semifinals, so you understand.

"We watched Granite City get excited when they won (their national semifinal game, 4-3 against the Northeast Generals of Attleboro, Mass.), they were excited to get to the championship," Ratzloff said. "That's not what we were there for. We were there to win, so we said 'let's save that for tomorrow."

With the last hurdle to the championship game cleared, the Grizzlies were a quietly confident group as they left the arena after their semifinal victory, knowing they'd be back in their locker room in approximately 14 hours to prepare for the championship game and a rematch with Granite City.

The teams had faced off back in December at the NA3HL Showcase in Blaine. Ratzloff said many of the college scouts and North American Hockey League scouts in attendance called it the best game of the Showcase, with Granite City pulling out a 3-2 victory thanks to a power play goal midway through the third period by Northfield native Carson Van Zuilen.

"I think we were battling some illnesses around that time and we didn't have our full roster yet — neither did they — but a lot of our key components were different," said Grizzlies assistant captain Mason Thingvold, a defenseman who played forward during that Showcase matchup.

As Thingvold sat in his hotel room the night before the national championship game, that December matchup against the Lumberjacks felt like ancient history. He noticed the confidence his teammates carried as they got off the team bus at the hotel that night. It wasn't a cockiness, but more of a belief that they were playing their best hockey of the season.

That confidence didn't help Thingvold get to sleep, though.

He and roommate Luke Morrisette had one of four consecutive connecting hotel rooms throughout the week in St. Louis. The connecting doors to all of those rooms remained open all week.

With puck drop for the championship game closing in on 12 hours out, Thingvold was restless. Two years earlier he had helped lead Red River High School in Grand Forks, N.D., to a state championship. He remembered how he and his teammates felt after winning in the state semifinals that year. He felt the same certainty in his Grizzlies teammates.

"We had the mindset that there was no way we were going to lose the next day," said Thingvold, who was key contributor on the Grizzlies team that lost in the national championship game a year earlier.

Thingvold paced through the connecting rooms before returning to his and pulling back the blankets on his bed. Most of his teammates were awake, too, but nothing was said.

No words were needed.

One player who slept well was goaltender Zach Wiese.

Wiese — the NA3HL Goaltender of the Year — struggled to rest after stopping 26 shots in Rochester's 4-2 win against Gillette (Wyo.) on Friday, March 25, in the final game of pool play. He was still a bit frustrated with his — and the Grizzlies' — performance in their tournament opener, when the Northeast Generals scored three first-period goals en route to a 5-2 win.

But the Owatonna native earned every bit of that shuteye the rest of the week, as he stopped 72 of the 75 shots he faced over Rochester's final three games at the Fraser Cup.

"Zach was unbelievable, a huge part of how we got there," said Grizzlies rookie forward Austin Meers, who grew up in St. Charles, Mo., just 10 minutes from the St. Peters Rec-Plex. "He made some big saves at big times in every game he played. Wieser was very even-keeled on and off the ice, but when he made a big save, it'd give the bench that energy to get going."

The Grizzlies had that energy from the get-go against Granite City.

Ratzloff and assistant coach Tyler Veen had closely watched the Lumberjacks' semifinal game the day before against Northeast. Granite City had built a 3-1 lead before holding off the Generals for a 4-3 win.

The momentum shifted about halfway through that game, when Northeast began to heavily pressure the Lumberjacks all over the ice.

"It was evident when Northeast played like that — they were all over them — that they forced Granite City's (defensemen) to struggle," Ratzloff said. "Our game plan from seeing that was, we're going to take their time and space away, we're going to pressure them all over the ice. We're not going to try to generate offense until we make them make a mistake."

Making the Grizzlies' run to the title game even more impressive is that they played nearly three full games without their leading scorer.

Rookie forward Kyle Bauer, who led the team in goals (24), assists (31) and points (55) in the regular season, suffered a left shoulder injury in the first period of Rochester's pool-play victory against Gillette on Friday, March 25.

Bauer watched the rest of that game, as well as the semifinal win against Helena, from the stands.

But when the Hastings native woke up on Sunday, the day of the title game, he thought he might be able to play. He taped up his shoulder — he'd suffered the same injury in his right shoulder a year earlier as a high school senior, and missed nearly six weeks of time — and suited up for warmups.

Bauer, who played in 49 of Rochester's 56 games, said he could shoot fairly well, but when he threw a soft check at linemate Adam Johnson, he knew he couldn't sustain any hits he might take at full game speed.

Ratzloff had left the bench, so Bauer skated to the bench to talk to assistant coach Tyler Veen.

"I just knew I couldn't go," Bauer said. "I couldn't take a hit. It was a tough thing to do (taking himself out of the lineup) but I don't regret doing it for the team."

Bauer's absence meant Meers would maintain that spot on the team's top line, next to Johnson and co-captain Justin Wright. Meers had slid into that spot two days earlier when Bauer went out; in fact, Meers double-shifted the remainder of that pool-play game, skating his shift with the Grizzlies' fourth line, as well as taking all of Bauer's shifts with the top line.

It paid off for the hometown boy, as he scored twice in Rochester's national semifinal win.

"Meersy stepped in and had a heck of a tournament," Grizzlies co-captain Cole Gibson said. "He was double-shifting, giving it his all. It was that way for us all year. When a guy goes down, the next guy plugs in."

The Grizzlies came ready to play.

From the opening drop of the puck, Rochester pressured Granite City heavily, for 200 feet, in all three zones.

It paid off 11:20 into the game, when former Rochester Century standout Lyncoln Bielenberg-Howarth forced a turnover at the offensive blue line and chipped the puck toward the net. Lumberjacks goalie Quentin Sigurdson couldn't control it, so Morrisette crashed to the net and poked it past him.

"That gave us some confidence," Veen said, "but it was still 'stay even-keeled.' Our message was 'don't get too high or too low. These guys are a great team and they can score quick.'"

Not with the way Rochester was playing, though.

The Grizzlies had two chances to extend the lead slip away in the first five minutes of the second period, coming up empty on a pair of power plays. But just 53 seconds after the second of those power plays expired, Max Breon made it 2-0.

That's how the score remained after two periods.

Rochester built on its momentum, killing 84 seconds of penalty time to start the third. Less than two minutes later, Oakland scored to make it a 3-0 game.

"Anytime you can get a good kill against Granite City it's a good thing," Wiese said. "Their power play is one of the best in the league. Our penalty kill did a good job of pressuring them. When they start shooting from the point and trying to go back-door, our guys took that away."

Johnson put the Fraser Cup on ice just 22 seconds into a power play, 7:33 into the third, with a bar-down slap shot from the top of the left circle. 4-0.

"After that goal, I remember me and Cupe (Nick Recupero) were looking at each other," Thingvold said, "and he said 'our bodies feel dead now, but we're going to be national champions in about eight minutes.'"

The hugs and pats on the back started with about 2 minutes to play.

Gibson, who played 99 games in his two seasons in Rochester, wasn't sure how to react. He tried not to think about it as the clock wound down, letting himself celebrate however it came naturally.

"I don't remember a lot of words being said in the last minute," he said. "Just a lot of yelling and kicking the boards. That was the first time I've ever been able to throw my gloves and stick and helmet in the air. You dream of those things. I'd never celebrated like that."

Backup goalie Niko Goich was the first to reach Wiese, who soon disappeared in a mob of black jerseys.

Bauer and the rest of the players not in the Grizzlies lineup had made their way to ice level and put their full gear on in order to celebrate with the team. They piled onto the ice, too.

After the 3 H's that come with winning a hockey championship — hugs, handshakes and hats — Gibson grabbed the Fraser Cup and skated it to his team.

The trophy somehow made its way to the locker room, where Ratzloff had a moment of reflection after delivering a brief congratulatory speech.

"We were in the same locker room as we were last year, when we lost," he said. "This year, it was a whole different feeling."

When Thingvold turned on his phone after the celebration, the voicemail and text messages began to flood in. The first was from Matt DeRosa, a three-year Grizzlies forward and a captain on the 2021 team that reached the Fraser Cup for the first time in franchise history. The first call Thingvold took was from Peyton Hart, who like DeRosa, was a leader on and off the ice for the first three seasons the franchise existed.

"Winning the national championship still gives me chills because it means so much," Thingvold said. "I think of where we were last year, those guys, I wish they could've been a part of this.

"DeRosa said 'we opened the door and you guys walked through it.' We wouldn't have been able to do this without those guys."