The Nebraska-Omaha Mavericks are the hottest thing in college hockey.
The Mavs made their first appearance in the NCAA Frozen Four last spring. They've won their first five games this season, the first four against nationally ranked opponents, and are No. 1 in a major poll for the first time. This weekend they opened one of the country's top college hockey rinks, the 7,900-seat Baxter Arena.
This is the vision athletic director Trev Alberts and his staff had four years ago when he shook up boosters and the city with the decision to make over the school's scuffling athletic program.
"We made a bold statement in 2011 that we're a hockey school and we're going to embrace it," Alberts said. "We're all in."
Seventh-year coach Dean Blais, who won two NCAA championships at North Dakota, has built a winner in an area where hockey has always been popular but where little high-level talent is produced. This season's roster is made up of players brought in from nine states and five Canadian provinces.
Among them are 18 freshmen or sophomores and nine NHL draft picks. The biggest star is the undersized and undrafted Californian Austin Ortega, who scored four of his nation-leading six goals in last week's two-game sweep at Vermont.
"They'll always be a power under Dean Blais," said North Dakota coach Brad Berry, an assistant under Blais at UND. "When Dean was here, he recruited guys with character, and that's what he's done in Omaha. The other thing is that he's got a staff around him that digs in like him and recruits hard. He's gained momentum in every program he's been a part of."
The rise of the hockey team and the elevation of the entire athletic program from Division II to Division I have coincided with UNO's transition from municipal commuter school to one of the region's top-rated public institutions.
Alberts was a star football player for the Nebraska Cornhuskers in the early 1990s, and after a short time in the NFL, he dabbled in broadcasting. Chancellor John Christensen hired Alberts in 2009 with the charge of stopping the financial drain that the athletic department had become.
All Alberts knew about hockey was that it was played on ice, but he understood it represented the best chance to generate significant revenue. The program was started as the school's lone Division I team in 1997 and has annually drawn among the biggest crowds in the nation.
Two months on the job, Alberts persuaded Blais to come to Omaha with a promise the team would move from the oversized CenturyLink Center downtown to an on-campus arena. Mike Kemp, the team's coach from its inception, became Alberts' right-hand man and helped lead the effort to build the arena, with half the $90 million cost paid by private donors.
Alberts' next big move came in 2011, when he announced the football and wrestling programs would be shuttered in a cost-cutting move and that all other sports would move to Division I. Alberts said the entire athletic program, hockey included, faced elimination if football and wrestling weren't sacrificed. Going Division I, he said, would provide larger revenue streams and raise the profile of the university.
The hockey team plays in the prestigious National College Hockey Conference, the rest of the sports are in the low mid-major Summit League.
"We're just so honoured and pleased it's turned out this way," Alberts said. "It's so hard to predict and plan, but this is kind of a taste of what we hoped we could accomplish, and a whole lot of people have worked hard together to make it happen and get everybody to buy in."
The 820 student tickets for Friday's home opener against Air Force, distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, were gone in 19 minutes. Last month more than 500 students entered an essay contest on what it means to be a Maverick, with 400 winners selected to help simultaneously flush toilets during an arena plumbing test.
The 64-year-old Blais lives in an apartment across from the arena and shows no sign of slowing down, especially after last year's NCAA Tournament run.
"When we got to the Frozen Four, I was known all over town," he said. "Before that, it was all Cornhuskers. That's fine. But we're getting some notice now."
That was Alberts' plan all along.
"Trev's a competitor and he wants to win," Blais said. "That's what he hired me for. It's happened."
This content appears as provided to The Globe by the originating wire service. It has not been edited by Globe staff.