↑ PWHL is back! – We're heading into the winter break for the college season, which makes the return of the PWHL all that more exciting. There should be no lack of women's hockey to watch and that's always a great problem to have!
↓ The PWHL commercial break music – Hearing it for the first time this weekend was like experiencing a recovered memory I'd buried way down deep. Add in that it played at several decibels above the volume of the game (if this were on tv, that would be illegal in the US) and it was no ok. There did seem to be more video packages so we didn't get several minutes straight of a jingle that's only a few seconds long, so I'll give it that, but goodness I'm not ready for months and months of that musical interlude on repeat.
↑ Milestones – Twice as nice for UMD as Clara Van Wieren reached her 100th career point and Olivia Mobley tallied her 50th NCAA goal. Boston College's Abby Newhook also reached 100 points and her coach, Katie Crowley, earned her 400th coaching win. There were a lot of hat tricks this week, but I wanted to shoutout Charlotte Sonntag, who recorded Holy Cross' first hat trick in the Hockey East (D1) era. Congratulations everyone!
↓ Six Nations not streaming in US – I'm tempted to say that the games won't be streaming in North America, but I couldn't confirm so I'll stick with what I was told, which is that USA Hockey does not have additional plans to stream these games. They expect there to be a Finland feed and said fans will need a VPN to watch it.
↑ Brown – The Bears won their first Mayor's Cup (for best team in Providence) for the first time since 2014.
↓ Slow starts? – With the Rivalry Series, training camp and scrimmages, it was a little surprising to see several PWHL teams have pretty forgettable first periods this weekend. I won't say more now, but I'll definitely be watching to see if this is an ongoing issue.
↑ Way too early award thoughts – Adding the asterisk that a whole lot of statistics are overblown due to some lopsided wins, so this list is on vibes as much as it is on stats.
Five standout freshman so far are Princeton's McKenzie Alexander, Colgate's Alexia Aubin, Ohio State's Jordyn Petrie, Union's Karianne Engelbert and Penn State's Grace Outwater.
Top goalies for me are St. Lawrence's Emma-Sofie Nordström, Quinnipiac's Kaley Doyle, Wisconsin's Ava McNaughton, Northeastern's Lisa Jönsson and Cornell's Annelies Bergmann.
My Patty Kazmaier/Player of the Year watchlist includes Issy Wunder and Alexander from Princeton, Colgate's Kalty Kaltounková and Elyssa Biederman, Wisconsin's KK Harvey and Casey O'Brien, Clarkson's Haley Winn and Anne Cherkowski, Minnesota's Abbey Murphy, Penn State's Tessa Janecke and Ohio State's Joy Dunne and Jenna Buglioni.
↓ Blowouts – For all parity and overtime we've seen this season, the college stat leaderboards are truly skewed with points and scoring totals that have come from hockey teams putting up football scores. That's not to demean the teams that lost or totally detract from the teams that scored, but when so few people get to really watch a wide array of games all season and look to the stats to determine which players are the best, it's frustrating to see inflated numbers and players from the same handful of teams dominating and difficult to parse out which players are impactful and which are the product of a friendly schedule.