On Jan. 16, Penn State topped the USCHO.com poll as the No. 1 team in college hockey. A program that just 2,313 days prior announced its plans to move to Division I was on top of the collegiate hockey world.
But that wasn't the ultimate prize.
"What's our goal?" senior forward Ricky DeRosa asked a few weeks later. "Win a Big Ten championship. Make the NCAA tournament."
This past Saturday, the dream came to fruition.
Liam Folkes slipped a breakaway shot through the legs of Wisconsin goalie Jack Berry in double-overtime to clinch the Big Ten hockey championship. Twelve hours later, Penn State was named a 3-seed in the 16-team NCAA men's hockey tournament, set to begin Friday on the ESPN family of networks.
For a team that was a club program five short years ago, those goals might have seemed unrealistic, and actually reaching them is unprecedented.
The Penn State Icers club hockey team had been in existence since 1971, playing their home games at the 1,350-seat Greenberg Ice Pavilion for the majority of that time and accumulating seven ACHA club national titles and nine runner-up finishes. That all changed on Sept. 17, 2010, when Buffalo Sabres owner and PSU alum Terry Pegula donated $88 million (later increased to $102 million), the largest private donation in school history, to the program and the university announced its plans to move to the Division I level. The first task would be a new home for the hockey team.
"During my visit, the rink was not anywhere near complete," senior captain David Goodwin recalled. "The hockey offices were in the basketball arena. I remember the coaches showing me blueprints and renderings in there of what the arena was supposed to look like. A little bit of a leap of faith that things would end up the way they said they would."
Pegula Ice Arena was completed with 14 suites, 525 club seats and a capacity of 5,704. The Roar Zone, a student section of about 1,000, capped off one of the best facilities in college hockey.
But high school prospects were sold on more than just a good sheet of ice.
In April 2011, the Nittany Lions hired Guy Gadowsky as head coach. Gadowsky had already turned around hockey programs at Alaska-Fairbanks and Princeton, helping the latter win the 2008 ECAC championship and lock up two NCAA tournament bids in his seven years at the helm. He coached an offensive, fast-paced style modeled on the aggressive play of his hometown Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s. That has certainly manifested itself this year with Penn State, which finished tied for second nationally in scoring, at 3.97 goals per game.
"It was really a trust factor," said DeRosa, who first skated with Penn State in Year 2 of the transition and the first season in the Big Ten (PSU played its initial season as an independent). "Talking with Coach Gadowsky and [assistant] coaches [Keith] Fisher and [Matt] Lindsay, I just really liked the sense that I got from them as far as what they wanted to do and build at Penn State."
The Div. I program kicked off in the 2012-13 season with 11 players from the former club roster and went 13-14-0. The Nittany Lions secured their first winning season in 2013-14 and tallied 21 wins the following season.
"Keith and Matt were staff at Princeton, and we all came over," Gadowsky said. "They just spent a ton of time on the road looking for players that didn't mind the challenge of starting at the bottom. I have so much respect and admiration for the guys that came here right from the start. There was no Pegula Ice Arena. And it was hinted that they wouldn't win at all for five, six years. There were players who would have loved to come to Penn State but told us, 'Man, I just don't want to lose for four years.' Then some guys came and said, 'I'm going to make it good.' That's why we have such respect for the initial classes."
After the 2015-16 season, Penn State graduated eight seniors, lost one player to retirement and surrendered its goaltender to the New York Islanders. The 2016-17 roster would include 11 freshmen.
"We thought it was going to be a little bit of a rebuild," said sophomore Andrew Sturtz, who leads the team in scoring with 21 goals. "It's obviously tough when you lose so many guys, but the second that the freshmen got on campus and we saw the work ethic, I kind of had a good sense that we were going to have some success."
A 16-2-1 start to the season led to the Nittany Lions' first No. 1 ranking in the Division I polls in mid-January. Perhaps on cue, they stumbled to 0-4-1 over their next five contests and hovered around No. 10 for the remainder of the season. When they dropped their final two games of the season on the road at Michigan, NCAA tournament hopes were in danger.
Gadowsky's team needed at least one win at the Big Ten tournament in Detroit to stay in true contention for the postseason. Matched up against the same Michigan team that swept it to end the season, Penn State exploded with offense in the first period and defeated the Wolverines 4-1. The next evening, it took down Minnesota 4-3 in double-overtime before completing its quest for a conference championship the next night in a 2-1 win over Wisconsin on Folkes' overtime winner.
Penn State will get a chance to continue its win streak Saturday evening in the Midwest Regional, where it meets 2014 national champion Union (4:30 ET on ESPN3 and the WatchESPN App).
"We took some lumps at the beginning. There was no grace period in what we were trying to establish here," DeRosa said. "The older guys before me established that you are playing Penn State hockey: blue-collar, hard-nosed hockey. That kind of mindset rolled from class to class. Guys all pulling in the same direction trying to win hockey games."
When Gadowsky took over the head-coaching job, he and his coaching staff put together a checklist for the program. One by one, the Nittany Lions have checked off the boxes.
"Everyone has bought into the system that Coach Gadowsky has taught us and made us successful with," said freshman goaltender Peyton Jones, who was named the Big Ten tournament's most outstanding player after a 51-save performance against Wisconsin. "Everyone is on the same page. Guys want to win, and they will do what it takes to win."
Just one of Gadowsky's boxes remains unchecked.
"Win on a bigger stage ... the national level."