Indiana Stun Rutgers 2-1 in Big Ten Quarterfinal and Book a Friday Date With Northwestern
Indiana don’t do things the easy way. They arrived in Columbus on a four-game losing streak, and they leave their quarterfinal with the biggest win of their season.
The fifth-seeded Hoosiers beat fourth-seeded Rutgers 2-1 on Wednesday morning in Columbus, in the opening game of the Big Ten Tournament. It was a rematch with a twist. Five days earlier, Rutgers had beaten this same Indiana side 2-1 at the Bauer Complex, outshooting them 10-6. This time the shots were almost dead even, Rutgers led the corner count 7-2, and Indiana still found a way.
That’s November hockey for you. Indiana scored both of their goals inside a frantic 11 minutes and 45 seconds of one quarter, then spent the last 16 minutes defending the lead like their season depended on it. It did. Rutgers got one back through Talia Schenck, the Princeton transfer who has been one of their best players all season, but the equaliser never came.
For Rutgers, that’s the season done at 11-8, and it’s a rough way to go out. They outshot Indiana 6-5, they matched them 3-3 on shots on target, and they still lost to a team they’d just beaten. Wednesday was also the last game for seven Rutgers seniors, honoured on Senior Day against Michigan State on 18 October. Schenck scored the last Rutgers goal of the year, which feels fitting. She was Second Team All-Big Ten and the conference’s Sportsmanship Award winner, and she kept fighting when the game was slipping away.
Indiana, now 10-7, get the reward every underdog dreams of and dreads in equal measure: No. 1 seed Northwestern on Friday semifinal at 1 p.m. ET on BTN. Northwestern shared the Big Ten regular-season title with Maryland at 7-1 in conference play and took the top seed on the head-to-head tiebreaker. They finished 16-2 overall. Nobody needs telling how hard that game will be.
But Indiana have already shown they can win a game they were supposed to lose. The other two quarterfinals, Maryland against Ohio State and Penn State against Iowa, were still to come on Wednesday evening in the US, so the second Friday semifinalist wasn’t known when this went to press. Whoever it is, they’ll have watched Indiana’s morning and known exactly what kind of tournament this is going to be.
