Complete weekly press release

Braced to take on the University of North Dakota in a best-of-three playoff series for the first time ever, Tigers travel to Grand Forks, N.D., this week with a shot at advancing to the National Collegiate Hockey Conference's inaugural Frozen Faceoff in Minneapolis.

Starting time at Engelstad Arena (11,634 seating capacity) is 7:38 pm CT Friday, then 7:08 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, if necessary, as CC tries to extend its season with a pair of victories.

A free webcast of each game can be seen at NCHCHockey.com and UNDsports.com.

Colorado College, 6-22-6 overall, finished seventh in the NCHC standings with a 6-13-5-1 mark in conference play after falling twice (7-4, 4-1) at home last week to St. Cloud State University. No. 9/10-ranked North Dakota, which settled for a split with Western Michigan University in Grand Forks last Friday and Saturday, is 20-11-3 overall and wound up 15-9-0-0 in league play, three points behind regular-season champion SCSU.

The Tigers have visited UND for the opening round of their league playoffs three times previously. They claimed a single-elimination victory (5-4) in 1969. They later were ousted twice under the WCHA's old two-game, total-goals format in 1979 (6-3, 7-3) and in 1987, when they actually won the second contest (2-1) after dropping the first (6-2).

North Dakota, which also beat CC four consecutive times at the WCHA Final Five before losing a 4-3 overtime decision there last March, won the only NCAA tournament contest between the teams (5-2) in the 1997 semifinals and has prevailed in eight of 11 post-season meetings altogether.

The teams have played each other a total of 230 times in the past, with UND owning a 141-79-10 advantage including a pair of home-ice victories (5-3, 3-2) in January of this year. CC is 5-12-3 in 20 appearances altogther at Engelstad Arena as well as 20-84-6 in 120 all-time encounters in Grand Forks.

Tiger Bytes: Senior forward Archie Skalbeck has picked up 10 (3g,7a) of his season total of 14 points (6g,8a) in the last 12 games ... Colorado College's freshman class has accounted for 26 of the team's 66 goals (39.4 percent) as well as 69 of its 177 points (39.0 percent) so far in 2013-14 ... Senior Josh Thorimbert recently became just the 13th CC goaltender in history to amass 2,000 career saves. With 2,062 to his credit, Thorimbert needs only eight more to leapfrog two-time All-American (2002-03 and 2004-05) Curtis McElhinney into ninth place on the program's all-time chart.