(Ed. Note: Ryan Lambert is our resident NCAA Hockey nut, and we decided it’s time to unleash his particular brand of whimsy on the college game every week. So NCAA HOCKEY 101 will run every Tuesday on Puck Daddy. Educate yo self.)

Red Berenson picked a hell of a time to get the 800th win of his career.

It came at the tail-end of a semi-impressive weekend sweep of Minnesota — which I'm sure he'd say left a lot of room for improvement — and kind of served to catapult Michigan back into the national conversation of teams that are actually really good. They should have been there all along of course, but they started the year just 2-5 and mostly looked awful doing it.

But after they dropped a pair at Michigan Tech on Halloween and All Saints' Day, then had two weeks off to really kick the tires and look at what was ailing them.

The answers, near as I can tell, seem to have been goaltending (.881 through their first seven games) and the fact that they were giving up more than 32 shots per night. That's a lethal combination in most circumstances, even leaving aside the team's handful of injuries. And when the offense also isn't working (2.7 goals per game, and that's buoyed by an eight-goal performance at UMass Lowell), you're going to look like you, as a coach, have finally lost that fastball after what feels like a thousand years.

But Michigan, for all its faults the last few years, is still Michigan, and the quality of that roster cannot be denied.

That plus some regression toward the mean, seems to have launched the team into the stratosphere since that Nov. 1 loss. From Nov. 2 on, in fact, the Wolverines have been the second-best team in the country in terms of actually winning games (10-2-0, behind only Minnesota State's 11-1-1) and all the underlying stats suggest they're doing it both with ease and at a repeatable level: 71.1 percent of the goals and 60.7 percent of shots. Their team goaltending has also jumped to .923, which is probably right around where it should be given what Edmonton draftee Zach Nagelvoort and Steve Racine did last season.

And obviously, the offense has come around as well, led by Florida prospect Zach Hyman. They've been scoring 4.5 goals per game since mid-November, and pulled their shooting percentage up appreciably in the process (it's now 11.2 percent, which is a little high even for this team's talent level). But Hyman has 18 points in the last 12 games, and Tyler Motte (15 in 10), Andrew Copp (14), Boo Nieves (11), and Michael Downing (10) aren't that far behind. Then there's Dylan Larkin, whose performance at World Junior was really just a reflection of what he's been doing for a while now: he's on 13 points in his last nine games, including 2-1-3 in this most recent sweep of Minnesota.

And let's just talk about the two wins against the Gophers, neither of which were all that comfortable. The Wolverines won 4-3 in overtime on Friday, then needed some prime special-teams play to win a wild 7-5 contest the next afternoon. And look, Minnesota obviously hasn't been that great this season — they've merely been “kind of great but then they lose some weird ones sometimes???” — but they're still one of the best and most talented teams in the country, and beating them twice, regardless of venue, is almost always going to be an extremely difficult task. The Gophers, in fact, are only 3-6-1 since mid-November, right around the same time Michigan started winning a lot, and are starting to feel the impact in terms of their standing in the Pairwise even after the hot 8-1 start.

The good news for both teams is that what's happened to this point largely does not matter. With the exception of Minnesota's upcoming participation in a pair of non-conference games for an in-season tournament, both teams have nothing but games against their Big Ten foes coming up, including a Valentine's Day weekend rematch of this series, this time at Mariucci. That gives Michigan a two months to solidify its position at the top of the conference, and Minnesota the chance to make up the ground they've lost to this point.

At the end of October, this never seemed as though it was a particularly likely scenario, with the Gophers and the rest of the Big Ten trying to run down the Wolverines, but here we are. Michigan is still on the outside of the NCAA tournament picture looking in, but given what they've got in front of them, and their form in the last few months, I don't really expect that to be the case much longer.

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