Northern Michigan University senior goaltender Atte Tolvanen makes a pad save in the third period as teammate senior defensemen Tony Bretzman looks on Nov. 16 during a game against Alaska-Anchorage. (Photo courtesy of Daryl T. Jarvinen)

MARQUETTE — The Northern Michigan University hockey team has a reason to be thankful right now.

After a sloppy game Friday night against No. 20 Lake Superior State, the Wildcats (6-8, 5-3 WCHA) got some sharp goaltending from Atte Tolvanen to emerge out of Sault Ste. Marie with a split over Thanksgiving weekend.

Tonight, NMU will need to be at its best as it faces No. 8 Notre Dame (7-4-1), last year’s national runner-up, on the road in South Bend at 7:30 p.m. This may seem like a tough task for a team that has been up-and-down so far this year, but a positive for Northern is that by the time the puck drops this evening, Notre Dame will not have played a game in 10 days.

Even with that advantage, the Wildcats’ offense (54th in the nation) might need a bit of luck to get past the Irish’s lockdown defense (fifth overall).

“The good thing is I’ve got a history with them,” NMU head coach Grant Potulny said. “Coaches, we kind of don’t change. We make adjustments, but we don’t change a ton. So I really didn’t need to see tape on how they were going to play. Why would you change when you’ve been so successful?

“They’re a very structured team. We’ve got to find ways to create chaos and get them out of their structure. Some of the ways you can do that is volume shooting because once there’s a shot, you can’t predict where it’s going to go. Then there’s some chaos. We’ve got to have really active defensemen. They’ve got to be really involved in the game to kind of create some chaos. We have to be very quick in the neutral zone and very quick coming out of our own end because if you want to play deliberate against them, it’s going to be really hard to score. If you can play a little bit up-tempo and try to create chaos in a couple different ways, you can stretch them out of their structure a little bit.

Potulny also emphasized that his team needs to start fast and taking advantage of the fact that the Irish haven’t played a game in a while.

“Special teams are going to be huge,” he said. “They have a very good penalty kill, so that’s going to be very important. You always want to score first, but when you play a really strong defensive team (like Notre Dame), it’s almost more important to score first. It almost sometimes teases a player’s psyche that they feel like they have to get it back right now and sometimes that causes people to get outside of the way they want to play.

“So starting fast and taking advantage of the fact that we have just played a couple of games and they’ve been off for 10 days. We should be a little bit sharper to start the game, you hope when somebody is off for 10 days. So we’ve got to use all those things to our advantage.”

What the Wildcats didn’t use to their advantage last Friday was that they got on the scoreboard first, but didn’t do much offensively the rest of the game. On the other hand, Northern looked better on Saturday, especially Tolvanen, who kept Lake State scoreless until the final seconds of the game. Tolvanen is tied for first nationally with three shutouts and is one shutout away from tying the school record of 12.

“It was disappointing Friday because we scored first,” Potulny said. “In the second period, there was nothing going on in the game either way. It was kind of just like a ping-pong neutral zone type of game. Nobody was really getting any chances either way. I kind of felt like it was going to be one of those games where if you just stuck with it, you could kind of grind one out 2-1, or 3-1, something like that. Not play great, but kind of catch them on a game when they weren’t playing great either. We kind of got outside what we were trying to do. (We) tried to stickhandle through people and turned pucks over. It really stalled our offense, which was bad on one side of it, but what was the real danger was that it kind of sparked them a little bit. I though they kind of got going the back half of that game. That was disappointing because you had a game that you probably thought you’d win without maybe having your best game, but we couldn’t stay with it.

“On Saturday, I thought the guys really played hard. They really were dialed in and emotionally invested in the game. Our puck placement was great and our physicality was high. We’re still having a hard time generating offense, which to me has just been the most baffling thing with our team. But we found a way to win the game and at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing.”

Some fans might be getting worried because NMU has been inconsistent out of the gate, but Potulny is still feeling positive as the Wildcats approach the Christmas break.

“Early in the year, there’s always a lot of time left,” he said. “Now I think we’re past the 20 percent point in the year and in the league, I think we’ve done okay. We need to continue to play well in the league and we need to start getting some sweeps. You can’t keep playing .500 hockey and think that you’re going to end up where you want to be. But on the flip side of that, we were probably in a very similar situation last year at this point and in the second half of the year, we took off.

“I still like our team and I like our depth. I like the ability that some of the guys at the top have had. I don’t know until this point that they’ve really found their groove yet. So that’s going to be really important. Your best players have to be your best players. We’ve got to find a way to help them get going.”