For 20 minutes, it looked like Miami might extend its season for at least another day.
Then Denver scored four unanswered goals en route to a 6-2 win over the RedHawks at Magness Arena on Saturday, sweeping its best-of-3 series and ending Miami’s 2025-26 campaign.
It was the 12th straight NCHC Tournament loss for the RedHawks, who extended their winless streak in this building to 18 games (0-17-1).
Miami’s 15-win improvement over 2024-25 was the second-biggest single-season surge program history only to the 1996-97 team, which jumped from 10 wins to 27.
RECAP: Miami (18-16-2) took the lead just 1:42 into the first period when Ethan Hay was able to bang a loose puck home through traffic on the left side of the net.
But Denver (23-11-2) tied it 5:12 into the second period. Miami goalie Matteo Drobac stopped a point-blank shot by DU’s Rieger Lorenz with his blocker, but the rebound popped into the air, hit the netting on top of the net, kicked backward and landed in the crease, where James Reeder poked it in.
Just 48 seconds later, Kieran Cebrian gave the Pioneers the lead with a laser from the right faceoff circle that beat Drobac high near post.
Less than three minutes after that, Denver’s Hagen Burrows went in alone and roofed a shot, glove side to make it 3-1.
The Pioneers extended their lead to three on a goal by Kyle Chyzowski, who backhanded a rebound shot from the right side of the cage over a sprawled-out Drobac with 1:01 left in that decisive frame.
Midway through the third period, Denver’s Sam Harris won a 1-on-2 battle along the half wall and centered a pass to Eric Pohlkamp, who took a stride and wired a hard wrister past Drobac on the glove side from the high slot, giving the Pioneers a 5-1 lead.
Miami cut the deficit to three with 4:18 left in regulation, as Vladislav Lukashevich carried the puck across the blue line, pulled up a left a drop pass for a streaking Doug Grimes, who hammered a slap shot through backup goalie Paxton Geisel.
But Denver’s Jake Fisher sealed it with 43 seconds remaining, grabbing a loose puck near his own net, curling and ripping a 190-foot shot into the empty Miami net.
STATS: Hay led MU with two points — his third multi-point game of the season — scoring his fourth goal of 2025-26 and snapping a nine-game points drought.
Grimes netted his 10th goal, becoming the fifth RedHawk to reach double-digits in tallies this season. Only five skaters had reached that mark in Miami’s last five seasons combined.
Defensemen Ryder Thompson and Michael Quinn both picked up assists on Hay’s goal, and coincidentally, both recorded their last point six games ago at North Dakota.
Lukashevich picked up his team-best 19th assist, and he wins the 2025-26 Miami defenseman scoring title with 21 points.
— Miami dropped its 12th straight NCHC Tournament game. The RedHawks have not won a Frozen Faceoff series since 2015.
— Six goals against tied MU’s season high. Western Michigan beat MU by the same score on Nov. 15.
LINEUP CHANGES: None. Even the lines and pairings remained the same as Friday.
ANALYSIS: This Miami team never ran out of fight.
Even down four goals in the third period of this elimination game, the RedHawks fought until the final horn.
This series was a sisyphean task: Beating a Denver team that has won two of the last four NCAA championships and took Western Michigan to overtime in a national final in another, on its home ice, at altitude. But Miami literally gave it the old college try and fell just short.
The Pioneers are impressive and played an outstanding series. They’re incredibly skilled, as Miami entered this series with a very slim margin for error. And DU is one of the best defensive teams in college hockey, so quality scoring chances were nearly impossible to come by.
It felt like Friday’s game could have gone another direction if the RedHawks could have gotten a break or two. The scoreboard read 3-0, but the last two were empty netters in the final minute and a half.
Then Saturday Miami had the lead until another physics-defying goal tied it, and before one could make a concession run, Denver was up 3-1. From that point the RedHawks were obviously chasing the game.
We’ll be writing plenty more about the team in the coming days, weeks and months, but at it’s hard to put into prose how much better of a place Miami hockey is in than 12 months ago.
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