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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — You could feel it coming the moment he slammed the penalty-box door — that familiar, sheepish half-grin Max Plante flashes when he knows he’s just done something he’ll have to fix later.
It’s the Plante family specialty: cause a little trouble, then clean it up with three goals and a shrug.
Fourth-ranked Minnesota Duluth marched into Ed Robson Arena on Friday night, spotted Colorado College a pair of early goals, took a five-minute major because Max decided to audition for the UMD Rugby Club, and still walked out with a 4–2 NCHC win like it was just another night at the office.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t tidy. It wasn’t even logical. But it was vintage Bulldogs hockey — the kind they bottle on London Road and ship to every rink west of the Mississippi.
And once again, the middle Plante brother was the loudest, most chaotic, most brilliant player in the building.
Plante scored three goals — two on 5-on-3s and the closer into an empty net — on the exact same night he sat for five minutes on a boarding major. The kid collected a hat trick and a criminal record in the same game. It was the full Plante experience, and Colorado College had absolutely no answer for it.
This is what happens when you’re the nation’s leading scorer, your family basically owns high school hockey in Hermantown, and you skate like you’re late for curfew. You take a dumb penalty, you apologize by scoring three, and everyone goes home happy. Well, everyone except the Tigers, who spent most of the evening trying to argue with the officials like they were negotiating property taxes.
The Tigers led 2–1 after the first and genuinely believed they were onto something. That lasted about as long as a Colorado Springs breeze. UMD killed the major — because of course they did — and then the Tigers lost their composure one penalty at a time, finally handing UMD two fat, gift-wrapped 5-on-3s with all the discipline of a distracted toddler.
Plante needed ten seconds to score the first one. He needed 66 seconds to score the next. That’s all it took. Game over. Turn out the lights.
You’d think teams would stop giving the Bulldogs two-man advantages by now. You’d also think Duluth drivers would stop merging at 15 miles per hour on I-35 in November snow. Yet here we are.
Kyler Kovich, who spent four years at Cornell politely waiting for someone to look in his direction, finally got his first UMD goal — a simple tap-in he celebrated like a man getting his security deposit back. And honestly, good for him. Hockey can be cruel. Sometimes you need one to remind yourself you can still play the sport.
Freshman Ryan Zaremba set it up, because all he does is set things up. He may actually pass the puck in his sleep.
Meanwhile, Harper Bentz, who has been missing longer than some local road projects, returned for the first time since his Alaska injury and brought just enough speed and physicality to give the Bulldogs a fourth line that felt like a fourth line again. The kid was probably sore for two straight months, but you wouldn’t know it by watching him play.
And then there’s Gajan, the UMD goaltender who often looks like he’s waiting for something more interesting to happen. He stopped 18 shots, picked up the assist on Max’s empty-netter, and spent the night making the game look much calmer than it was. The kid might start charging rent for the blue paint.
Colorado College… well… bless their hearts. They tried. They really did. They even looked dangerous early. But when your penalties arrive in clusters and your bench argues its way into extra minutes, you’re not beating a team that stores Plantes like other families store Christmas decorations.
UMD’s special teams? Fantastic. Colorado College’s special teams? Let’s just say they were “participation-based.”
And now the Bulldogs — 3–0 this year after a loss, because they treat adversity like an annoying housefly — get another crack at the Tigers on Saturday. If CC is smart, they’ll stay out of the penalty box, avoid two-man disadvantages, and maybe, just maybe, stop poking the Plante brothers with a stick.
But they won’t. No one ever does.
Because this is UMD. This is NCHC hockey. And this is Max Plante’s world right now. Everyone else is just trying not to get eaten alive.
Howie, 71, is a veteran Duluth journalist and publisher of HowieHanson.com, which he has operated for 21 years. He is the region’s first and only full-time online columnist, covering local news, politics, business and sports with an independent, community-centered voice. Hanson has spent more than five decades reporting on issues that shape the Northland.
