Ten years ago today, Shayne Gostisbehere and Union College won the NCAA National Championship. In a THN exclusive, Gostisbehere reflects on that unique Cinderella run

Red Wings defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere got his first offer to play NCAA hockey as a junior at South Kent, a prep school with fewer than 200 students in western Connecticut.  

The offer came from little Union College, a school about 30 minutes northwest of Albany, bigger than South Kent but at just 2,200 students, not by as much as you might expect.  As it turned out, it was the only offer Gostisbehere needed, and his decision to pursue it would be rewarded more than he could possibly have imagined as a junior in high school.

"I just liked the fit of the school in the sense of good academics and a very small school," Gostsibehere told The Hockey News in early April of the decision to accept the first offer that came his way.  "I went to a small high school, so I just felt like it was going to be an easier transition, especially as an 18-year-old."

What followed was a three-year run of dominance.  When Gostisbehere arrived, Union hadn't won an NCAA Tournament game since the 1980s, and that came before the program jumped from Division III to Division I in 1991.  During his freshman season, Gostisbehere and the Dutchmen (since renamed the Garnet Chargers) advanced to the first Frozen Four in school history.  As a sophomore, he helped steer Union to the second round of the tournament, before falling in a regional final loss to Quinnipiac.  

Then, as a junior, Gostisbehere scored nine goals and provided 25 assists in 42 games on the way to a national championship.  In the title-clinching game, a 7-4 win over the Gophers, he recorded a goal, two assists, and a +7 rating.  That victory came 10 years ago today on April 12th, 2014.

As Gostisbehere tells it, the best of the three teams was actually the first, even if it wasn't until his junior season that broke through for a title.  "My freshman year team is actually probably the best team I played on, just unfortunately didn't have our best game in the Frozen Four," Gostisbehere said.  "We were really excited just to be in the Frozen Four at that time.  It was the first time our school had any success in the tournament.  I think for us, the third time around, when we got to the tournament, it was a more business-like approach, and thankfully it worked out."

The 2014 Frozen Four brought together three perennial powers (North Dakota, Boston College, and Minnesota) and one school whose entire student population couldn't fill up the arena on the campus of any of its three competitors, but it was Union who emerged from the weekend in Philadelphia with the trophy.

Because of the Dutchmen's relative obscurity and unspectacular history, Union was an underdog to the hockey world who watched their success, but, as Gostisbehere points out, their run didn't come from nowhere.  It was born of the experience of near misses in the two years prior and at the conclusion of a season in which the Dutchmen were stapled at or near the top of the polls from wire to wire.

"I think people don't really pay attention to the tournament until the Frozen Four, where it gets a little more coverage, and people obviously don't know what Union College is," Gostisbehere reflects.  "But we'd been to the tournament almost four years in a row at that point and went pretty far.  So I think for us, we never listened to the outside noise.  We knew how good of a team we were and what we had to do, and we took care of business."

"Our team was just so dialed," he adds. "Every guy had a specific role. We were an older team, but we had the identity of a very good defensive team, sprinkled with some skill around. We played a pretty good system to a T, and every guy on the team knew their role and knew what they had to do."

And the Dutchmen had to be dialed to claim their crown.  In the national semi-final, Union took down Boston College 5-4, beating an Eagles team loaded with future NHL stars in Johnny Gaudreau, Kevin Hayes, and Thatcher Demko.  The Minnesota team Union beat in the title game featured several future NHLers in Brady Skjei, Hudson Fasching, and Gostisbehere's current Red Wing teammate Justin Holl.

As if a single-elimination hockey tournament for a national championship doesn't have enough pressure baked in, Gostisbehere also had to contend with the specter of his professional future at the 2014 Frozen Four.  The Flyers had selected him in the third round of the 2012 Draft, so the weekend served as a welcome to his new home and something of an audition before the fans who'd soon support him.

"It was cool just getting a taste of Philadelphia, staying downtown and whatnot," Gostisbehere says.  "It was my first time being down there for an extended period of time, so it was cool.  I obviously signed the next couple days after that, so it was a whirlwind experience, and it was awesome."  As a junior, he had one year left of NCAA eligibility, but his dominant three-year run suggested he might not have any use for it.

Then, the night before the title game against the Gophers, Gostisbehere made up his mind; he would play just one more college hockey game.  "I knew I was going to sign," he says.  "My agent and I talked about it the night before the game.  He's like 'I kinda gotta let the GM know what we're gonna do,' and I said I wanted to leave.  I had one game left ultimately, and I just said I was gonna make it my best game I ever played, and it worked out."

10 years later, the reaction the run and title inspired on campus remains stamped in Gostisbehere's mind. "It was awesome," he says. "We saw videos of the night of, and then we came back the next morning, and the whole school was waiting for us. Something I'll cherish memory-wise forever." And because of Union's modest enrollment, "the whole school" is hardly hyperbolic.

For a school of just 2,200 to capture a Division I national championship is as improbable as any American sporting achievement of the 21st century, but the Gostisbehere-led Union run defied even our expectations for a Cinderella.  

First, because even if the Dutchmen were an upstart to the outside world, the team itself had a much different self-perception.  And, more importantly, because unlike other popular American underdog stories (2006 George Mason men's basketball, 2013 Florida Gulf Coast men's hoops, or even last season's eighth-seeded, barely-made-the-playoffs Florida Panthers), Gostisbehere and Union finished the job with a championship.

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