I don’t have a whole lot to say in memoriam of the Duluth East 2024-2025 season. It is hard to sugarcoat 4-23. I will give credit for effort, for gutting out a long season, for loyalty when kids could have jumped ship. They made it through, bloodied but honorable, and in a weird way this season ends with a less sour taste than 2021-2022, which came with some ugliness, or 2023-2024, when I thought the team was capable of more than it achieved.

Those four wins were worth something in the end. The victory over Andover was genuinely impressive, as the Huskies rounded more into form and are a mild favorite to win a section championship on Thursday. And if East could have won just one game this year, most people associated with the program would have chosen the one with Duluth Marshall. They pulled that one out with a solid effort from start to finish, a display of what their defense could be, and a diverse cast of forwards doing enough positive things to get the win. I do wish the program had made more effort to match the schedule to the talent level, but I understand why it wasn’t, and I hope for at least some adjustments next season.

This team also finished respectably. They fought back from three down to avoid infamy in a loss to Anoka, and after a painstaking start, they gave top-seeded Rock Ridge a decent run in the quarterfinals. No one will remember it as a moment of greatness, but there was no quit, and I enjoyed watching some of the younger kids come along. The line of Easton Ohrn, Mckennen Kramer, and Cole Licari was a fun little wrecking crew by season’s end, and players like Marccus Anttila and Fin Kuzmuk have some real skill that could be harnessed for good. There was real progress among the underclassman defensemen of Landon Pearce, Henrik Spenningsby, and Wally Lundell, and goaltender Nolan Nygaard did yeoman’s work as he endured barrage after barrage of shots. There are pieces to start climbing back out of this hole next season, and the long-term trajectory looks to be generally upward.

Just how far upward will depend on youth player retention. Duluth hockey does not have the numbers to split several ways and put out a serious contender, and when one looks at the Bantam rosters for this age group, a minority of the players going through ended up at Duluth East. Some went to Marshall, but Marshall itself then lost some players, and in the end the Toppers’ season, when weighted for a cupcake schedule, was not all that far off from East’s. While Marshall has the returning players to be better next season, they’re also approaching a situation where their numbers are scarily low, and this group of East youth players who became Toppers does not look like the start of some seismic shift in Duluth hockey.

Even mighty Hermantown, the dominant local power since East fell off at the end of the 2010s and now an occasional destination for skilled Hounds youth, is seeing some advantages recede, as Hibbing showed the world with a section-shaking win this past Saturday. Looking at youth scores, East is right there with the Hawks over the next few age groups, and with Hibbing surging and a drop-off in Grand Rapids looming after next season, the road to State may not be all that much easier in 7A than it is in 7AA. It is within East’s ability to step in and become the Duluth area power—and a 7AA front-line contender—again in the next few years. They just need the buy-in and the leadership to do it.

Those decisions are beyond my control, and I will be along for the ride wherever it leads. I will conclude by thanking our seniors: Caden Cole, Kyle Peterson, Timmy Balthazor, Christian Cochran, and Ryan Jensen. They stuck it out through a tough season, and they provided some good moments. They are part of the bridge on to whatever may come next for Duluth East hockey. May that era be a brighter one.

For the past five Duluth East hockey seasons, I have sometimes felt like a chronicler of dramatic upheaval. From 2019-2022, there was plenty of theater, if often the wrong kind: a first losing season in decades, the craziness of the pandemic, the saga of an outgoing coach, some ugly headlines over fights. 2022-2023 saw a fleeting renaissance; 2023-2024 had elevated expectations after that run that never quite came together. There were storylines left and right, and I never suffered for things to write, even if I did not always enjoy writing them.

This season? Well, we endure. A 2-12 record speaks for itself. I could grumble about goalie rotations and fourth line shifts; there certainly have been some winnable games that slipped away, and a record of, say, 5-9 or 6-8 would be enough to be a legitimate top four seed contender in what passes for Section 7AA this season. But I am not here to criticize a lot. The team is trying, and its talent level doesn’t lie. They are young, trying to bring players along, making do with what is here.

It is hard not to ponder the decline with some bitterness. I could blame certain adults’ egos or wax philosophical about cultural and demographic drift. Some will blame the coaching change, but the start of the downturn preceded Mike Randolph’s ouster. Duluth Marshall pulled more above average kids from the youth ranks than it ever has for a variety of scattered reasons, though they too have now suffered defections that have left them only a marginal contender. Add in a few other departures or decisions simply to opt out and the sheer number of AA Duluth East youth players who are not on the Duluth East High School roster is the largest it’s ever been. While it isn’t realistic to expect perfect retention anymore, even marginal improvement would be worth a number of wins. A new dad friend points out we are moving through the youth group that never played Squirt A hockey, and when one watches head-down dangles out through the crease in one’s own zone even by some of the relatively skilled players, it’s not hard to jump to conclusions about missed lessons. When this team actually moves the puck, it has some life to it.

I confess I am watching less than I have in the past. Even in the stands there are many new faces, fewer buoyant pregame gatherings or shared road trips, more people isolated in their own worlds. But there are still flickers of what make this sport, and devotion to a program, so incredibly fun. A well-played contest with Andover, down but still dangerous, that ended in an overtime win brought back a little of that old feeling. They hung in there with Grand Rapids alright in the second meeting. There are some pieces among the younger players who can be a foundation of something; perhaps not a section champion next season, but at least a top four seed with a better record. When the energy builds, high school hockey can still build to something that no junior league or AAA program can ever muster.

But we are where we are now. Forget any scheme to pull a playoff upset, forget building a case for a certain seed in sections. One some level, forget winning too, though I don’t want it to devolve into participation trophy hockey, either. Build basic skills and try to get some momentum. Keep the seniors together, but start trying to build some chemistry among the younger players for the future. Work on conditioning, and pick an official starter in net. Uphold the honor, and find ways to improve relative to the competition.

I am reasonably optimistic there are brighter days ahead. The youth teams, collectively, appear to be on the upswing, and it sounds like retention should be somewhat better going forward. I have some lingering worries, but the fundamentals for hockey on the east side of Duluth still look decent; even better, perhaps, than they have been in the near past, with Hermantown’s edge on the local scene eroding somewhat. There is something here to be harnessed. Until then, I watch on, finding what I can in it, still in the thralls of a sport that pulls together glory days past and a promise of the future into the fleeting intensity of an adolescent present.