Sal Maiorana and Erik Brady

USA TODAY Sports

GENESEO, N.Y. — Matthew Hutchinson’s name won’t be on the roster when the Geneseo Knights take the ice in the NCAA Division III hockey tournament Saturday, but his number will be in the rafters — and his memory in their hearts.

Hutchinson, a senior defenseman from British Columbia, was killed in January in a murder-suicide that made national headlines and shook this bucolic village by New York’s Finger Lakes. Police said a distraught former boyfriend of Geneseo women’s basketball player Kelsey Annese entered the off-campus home where she lived and stabbed her and Hutchinson before killing himself.

The picture-book liberal arts college — a jewel of the State University of New York system — was left bereft, as were the hockey and women’s basketball teams. Both would soldier on to memorable seasons: The basketball team lost in the second round of the Division III NCAA tournament last Saturday; and the hockey team plays host to Salve Regina this Saturday.

“We’re trying to represent Hutch, and there’s a lot more to play for,” junior forward Stephen Collins tells USA TODAY Sports. “It has really motivated us.”

A win on Saturday would send the Knights to the quarterfinals — and a win there would mean the Frozen Four in Lake Placid.

"I think we have a team that can win it all,” says Collins, SUNY Athletic Conference player of the year, “as long as we play our game.”

Coach Chris Schultz didn’t know how his team would be when it lost Hutchinson in such terrible and shocking fashion.

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“The one thing that’s a little different about hockey is you become a family a little more than the other sports, in my opinion,” says Schultz, conference coach of the year. “And these guys are family, they literally lost a brother, and when that happens you have no choice but to rally around each other.

“A couple days after it happened, we were in the office talking and we said this could go one of two ways — the guys can fold the season, or they can rally, and all four of us coaches agreed that there’s going to be good things that are going to happen to this team because of this. They’re going to honor a fallen brother.”

That the Knights are still playing is a testament to their talent but also to their resolve and their courage, as they’ve endured more than murder in their midst. In October, sophomore forward Jason Stephanik fell from a skateboard and suffered a traumatic brain injury that nearly cost him his life.

“We’re playing for each other,” junior forward Trevor Hills says, “especially with everything that has gone on with our team this year.”

Schultz thought his Knights had a chance to be pretty good when this season began, but his honest assessment was that they were probably a year away. “It’s coming a little earlier for us,” he says.

Geneseo enters the NCAAs at 18-4-6, including a surprisingly easy three-game breeze through the conference tournament where they defeated Potsdam, Buffalo State and Plattsburgh by a combined 17-3.

Geneseo was seeded third in that tournament. The Knights played for the conference title at top-seeded Plattsburgh, which was the defending champ gunning for its 23rd conference title.

“Our team has faced fear square in the face,” Schultz said before that game. “Playing a hockey game up there is nothing in comparison.”

Geneseo won, 7-1, for its fourth conference title and first since 2006.

“It’s a banding together and believing, a mentality that nobody’s going to stop us,” Schultz says. “We’ve seen it in the playoffs. We’ve beaten up on really good hockey teams.”

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The Knights were just getting over the loss of Stephanik — who is still recovering from his fall but is back at school taking a couple of classes — when Hutchinson was murdered. How much can a group of college kids take?

“We knew that we were going to fall apart if we didn’t come together,” Hills says. “We needed everybody to be there for each other and stick up for each other. It helped mold us to be the people we are now. I think we’re a much stronger group, emotionally stronger and mentally stronger, because of everything.”

Hutchinson played in his last game the day before he was killed, assisting on the final goal in a 6-2 home win against Franklin Pierce University. Annese played the day before the murders, too. The career role player, who was named a captain before this season, scored a career-best five points in a 63-52 win against Buffalo State.

“It was the best I’ve ever seen her play,” point guard Dana Cohan said after the killings. “I’ve never seen her so happy after (a game). We were all so happy for her.”

Before hockey’s final regular-season home game, Hutchinson’s parents, Keith and Susan, were invited to Geneseo from their home in North Vancouver, British Columbia, for the retirement of their son’s No. 23. A banner now hangs on a wall in the arena, and Hills knows that Hutchinson will be looking down on the Knights forever more.

“It makes you play that much harder, you see his number up there and you want to put everything on the line for him because he would have done the same for you,” Hills says. “We won the SUNYAC championship for him. We would have done anything to win that game.”

And Saturday the Knights hope to display that same ethos against Salve Regina (17-10-1) with that trip to the national quarterfinals on the line.

“If we play with the same passion and emotion,” Schultz says, “the same willingness to block shots, play with that sandpaper mentality, we’re going to be tough to beat.”

Contributing: Leo Roth and Jeff DiVeronica; Roth, DiVeronica and Maiorana are reporters for the Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle