Bemidji? Thank Paul Bunyan

WASHINGTON – Good thing Bemidji State University decided not to change its name a few years back. Imagine the collective yawn from those outside hockey if some place called “University of Northern Minnesota” had made the Frozen Four.

But Bemidji State? That’s cool! That’s George Mason in the Final Four – only a lot harder to spell.

“The best thing about it is most people stumble over it at first,” said Bemidji resident Alan Korpi, sitting with his wife on Row 7 of the Verizon Center on Wednesday watching his beloved Beavers practice. “And that’s funny. ‘Bemini, buh-buh,’ you know.”

“I actually have a license plate that has ‘BRMIDJI,’ “ chimed in fellow Bemidjian Scott Robbins, sitting two seats over in his green-and-black BSU hat and sweat pants, “because our temperature is quite often 20 degrees below zero, so that’s a more accurate name for the town.”

For the record, it’s pronounced beh-MIDGE-ee, although a sports nation that loves its out-of-nowhere stories has spent the last week or so calling it other names. The place that’s suddenly on the map – the team that rose from the absolute bottom seed of the 16-team tournament to advance to today’s national semifinal against Miami of Ohio.

“I’ve heard ‘Cinderella,’ ‘David vs. Goliath,’ ‘Miracle,’ things like that, so I’m definitely up on my fairy tales,” Beavers coach Tom Serratore said. “I think a lot of people and a lot of different areas of the country have adopted Bemidji State, and we are a feel-good story. That’s gratifying, and hopefully we won’t let them down.”

One word no one is using this week is “dynasty.” The Bemidji State-Miami (Ohio) game features two teams in the Frozen Four for the first time, and each was the lowest seed in its regional. The other semifinal – Vermont vs. No. 1 overall seed Boston University – pits schools that haven’t been this far since the 1990s.

“It’s great for college hockey – you can see the parity,” Miami coach Enrico Blasi said. “You can see the enthusiasm. It wouldn’t surprise me from here on in if you see different Frozen Four teams the rest of the way.”

While outsiders have been pitching the Cinderella line to Serratore, the coach used another fictional character to educate the uneducated about Bemidji, a town with about 12,000 people whose namesake lake was created, according to legend, by a big blue ox.

“Everyone has their identity. Obviously, it’s the nation’s capital here and you have the White House and the Capitol and all the monuments. We’re noted for Paul Bunyan and Babe,” Serratore said.

“They created the great waterway we have there called Lake Bemidji and the Mississippi River. We’re noted for pine trees, water and Beaver hockey. It’s just a big part of the culture of northern Minnesota and the identity of our community. That’s how people identify with Bemidji.”

In fact, the fan with the “BRMIDJI” license plate said that his grandfather, Buck Robbins, helped build the town’s famous Paul Bunyan and Babe statue in 1937. Sixty years later, the U.S. Postal Service came to town to launch its Paul Bunyan stamp. The local high school teams are known as the Lumberjacks. (The girls’ teams, until recently, were the Lumberjills.)

The Beavers’ conference, College Hockey America, shrunk to four teams this season and is disbanding. BSU has applied to join the Western Collegiate Hockey Association next season, an idea WCHA commissioner Bruce McLeod calls “problematic” from a scheduling standpoint because it would make for an odd number of teams. Trying to survive as an independent is not a realistic option.

Winning the national championship would help the cause, but Serratore feels it’s a cause that doesn’t need much help.

“We didn’t need to go to the Frozen Four to validate our resume,” the coach said. “We’ve had 13 national titles at the small college level. We’ve had over 20 conference championships. We like our resume. We feel we’ve done a lot for the game.”