The Alfond Arena faithful have waited and waited for the University of Maine men’s hockey team to snap out of this miserable season and string together some wins.

They are still waiting.

The Black Bears’ Hockey East playoff aspirations are clinging by a thread.

It is a position nobody is used to. Maine has never missed the Hockey East playoffs when it was eligible to compete in them dating back to the league’s inception in 1984-85. The NCAA banned Maine from the NCAA tourney in 1996-97 for a variety of violations and the league decided to ban it from the HE tournament.

So Maine’s “Regionals” are starting a month early: this weekend.

Maine is six points behind UMass in the battle for the eighth and final playoff spot in Hockey East. The Bears have lost seven straight.

The two teams meet in Orono on Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m.

What a difference a year makes as these two teams met in the NCAA quarterfinals last March.

The Black Bears must sweep the Minutemen to stand any chance of earning the eighth seed. The teams will have four games left after this weekend.

Maine will travel to surging Vermont for a pair and then host UMass Lowell.

UMass plays home-and-home series with Boston University and last-place Merrimack.

“This series is going to be more important than the [previous] regionals,” said Maine junior goalie Ben Bishop, the primary reason the Bears are still alive.

The Black Bears haven’t caught any breaks this season, but they can’t complain.

They have been to nine consecutive NCAA Tournaments, receiving their share of breaks along the way like any consistently successful program.

Last season, it would have taken just one or two upsets in the league tournaments to keep Maine out of the NCAAs.

But there weren’t any, Maine qualified despite losing four straight games to UMass, including two in the HE tournament, and the Bears upset St. Cloud State and UMass in the regionals behind Bishop to earn a fourth Frozen Four berth in six years.

Bishop had missed the four UMass games due to injury.

Maine lost 67.7 percent of the goal production off last year’s team and the top two returning scorers up front, Billy Ryan and Keenan Hopson, have missed nine and six games, respectively, due to injury.

Chris Hahn, who scored four goals in 12 games, missed 12 games with two injuries, and top-scoring freshman Andrew Sweetland has missed six.

Maine has scored two goals or less 16 times and one or less 12 times.

To their credit, the Bears are still working their tails off, which has enabled them to be competitive in spite of their talent and speed deficiencies created by a couple of poor recruiting years, particularly when it comes to forwards.

When you go 1-15-2 against your three top rivals (Boston College, BU and New Hampshire) over two seasons, it clearly indicates you’ve got some ground to make up in the recruiting wars.

Those three teams each had a line with more career goals than did the 12 forwards Maine had in its lineup against them.

Bishop played the best series of his career in a pair of overtime losses to BU last weekend, and he gives the Bears hope they can pull out a miracle finish despite their 1-7-2 home record in league play.

They will have to scratch out enough goals to win. If they make the playoffs, nobody will want to play them.

lmahoney@bangordailynews.net

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