Far from being conservative in the extra period, the teams put on a twenty-minute offensive barrage, and only superhuman efforts between the pipes by Maine's Blair Allison and Michigan's Marty Turco kept the game tied thru the first overtime. For the first half of the second overtime, both teams seemed to be showing the fatigue of 80 minutes of hard-fought hockey. Maine seemed to gain the upper hand late, though, but the period ended with the score still tied at three, and the game on record as the longest in NCAA tournament history, and within a minute and a half of the longest game ever in College Hockey. Then ESPN's satellite time ran out. As in previous intermissions, they went away to the golf tournament they'd been preempting since the end of regulation, but this time, they didn't come back until about ten minutes after the period #6 was supposed to start. Although they didn't say so at the time, they came on the air with tape-delayed footage of a faceoff in the Michigan end, about 25 seconds into the third overtime. Wham, bam, Maine's Dan Schermerhorn put the puck in the net, and after 100 minutes and 28 seconds, the game was over; the Black Bears had prevailed 4-3 in triple overtime, but the memories will last a lifetime. So too, it seems, will the nasty letters to ESPN.
After that marathon, the rest of the tournament was a bit anticlimactic, and the BU Terriers rolled to a 7-3 victory over Minnesota in the other quarterfinal, and defeated a tired Maine squad two days later, 6-2 in the final to become the 1995 NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey Champions.
Until the 1995-96 College Hockey season starts in the fall, this is Joe P------k, KJUC sports.