The regular season has reached its end, and the No. 18 Illinois hockey team is preparing to face No. 17 Lindenwood in the first round of the CSCHL tournament this Friday.

After receiving the exciting news Monday night that they will be heading to Delaware for the ACHA national tournament, the Illini have now set their focus on the Lions and this weekend’s league tournament.

“Right now we’re just focused on league, especially with the quality teams we’re facing,” senior forward John Scully said. “I think we enjoyed it (Monday) night and we came out to practice today and played some small area games to kind of focus on that. We started right away with practice to get focused on (Lindenwood).”

Illinois has been practicing playing in narrower areas in order to prepare for Lindenwood’s smaller rink, which is this year’s location of the league tournament. Senior goaltender Nick Clarke doesn’t expect the Lions to benefit too much from having home-rink advantage.

“I’m sure they’ll have a decent crowd, but it’s nowhere we haven’t been before,” Clarke said. “Every year we play a home-and-road series against them, so we’re familiar with their rink and we’re familiar with their locker rooms. We know exactly where to go right when we get there. So it doesn’t really play that big of a factor.”

The Illini’s last trip to Lindenwood wasn’t very successful, as they suffered two losses by a total margin of 13-2 for the weekend. Illinois is 6-3 since that weekend, however, and head coach Nick Fabbrini thinks it is a much better team now.

“I think we’re a much different team now than the first four times we played them this year,” Fabbrini said. “We need to come out and do the things that we’ve done well the past couple of weeks to get us into the position that we’re in now. I think we’ll give ourselves a great chance to win if we do that.”

The Illinois seniors used that disappointing weekend in Lindenwood to rally the team in its recent run at making the national tournament, so it’s fitting that the Lions will be the Illini’s first challenge in the league tournament.

“Any time something like that happens, when we go and have a bad weekend, we want a chance to face them as soon as a possible,” Scully said. “We’re looking forward to it. If we come out and show up and play consistent, we’re going to be in good shape.”

Illinois is the No. 5 seed of six teams in the CSCHL, and if they are able to defeat Lindenwood on Friday, they will most likely face the regular season CSCHL champs, Robert Morris, in the semifinals on Saturday; however, if Indiana can beat Iowa State on Friday, Illini will match up against Ohio on Saturday since Robert Morris has the luxury of facing the lowest-seeded team that advances to the second round. Since Indiana has just one win in conference play this season, this scenario seems unlikely.

Clarke still thinks the tournament is a toss-up, though.

“I think anything could happen, that’s the good thing about hockey,” he said. “Regardless of seed, I think any team in this league could beat anyone on any given night, and that’s been proven.”

Even with the possibility of playing multiple teams in one weekend, Fabbrini isn’t too concerned about game planning since every team in the CSCHL is already familiar with each other.

“Obviously we adjust a little bit from team to team, but we want to play the same way every game,” Fabbrini said. “I think that we have one of the best skating teams in the league, so that’s something we’re going try to take advantage of regardless of who we’re playing. It’s just a matter of us executing and playing with the amount of energy and passion that we need to play with to be successful.”

Joey can be reached at [email protected] and @joeyfigueroa3