MARQUETTE — It’s all come down to this weekend for the Northern Michigan University hockey team.

Before last weekend, Northern needed a sweep of now-No. 19 Lake Superior State to keep its hopes alive for hosting a first-round WCHA playoff series.

The Wildcats accomplished that task, but to ensure that home series, they need to keep winning this weekend, the final series of the regular season.

This weekend its their other Upper Peninsula rival, Michigan Tech, who provides the opposition. NMU (17-14-2, 16-8-2 WCHA) has already had one entertaining series with the Huskies (14-16-4, 13-10-3) this season with Northern goalie Atte Tolvanen scoring a goal during the Friday outing in Marquette.

Unlike the Wildcats, the Huskies do not appear to be in the mix for a home playoff series as they’d need to sweep NMU and get some help from other teams to be in that mix. But there’s still a lot riding on this weekend.

“I’ve never won there (with the Wildcats),” Northern head coach Grant Potulny said. “This group has won with (previous head coach) Walt (Kyle). I’ve won (in Houghton) at my former job (Minnesota). I’ve never won with this group.

“The biggest challenge for us is to prepare to win a game on Friday night. It’s time for us to have a great effort and close the deal out. I feel like we’ve played well one time up there in three chances.

“Last year, the second game we had up there we had a 2-0 lead and got into penalty trouble and ended up losing the game. No. 1, we’ve got to slow them down. We can’t allow them in their building to allow their fans into it because they could take the game from a whole lot of nothing and just ramp it up and all of a sudden, they could have 10 shots in three minutes and score two goals.

“We’ve got to make sure we don’t allow that by great puck placement and having a great structure. They’re going to get chances because they’re a good team, but we can’t give them any extra chances.”

To keep the Huskies from getting those extra opportunities, Potulny said that the Wildcats’ top players have to be the best players whenever they’re on the ice.

“Our best players need to be the best players on the rink,” he said. “That’s the biggest matchup. I wish I had a more specific answer.

“The guys who have carried us the last three years and who led us to victory last weekend, those guys are the keys this weekend.

“That’s just the responsibility of being a top player. It’s not always about scoring. It’s having positive shifts, creating energy and winning the turf war. Whatever it is, it’s just having a positive impact on the game.”

When asked about the playoff picture, Potulny said that the Wildcats can’t focus on that too much; instead, they need to zero in on getting a win Friday.

“Some of it is out of your control,” he said. “At one point of the year, we were in control of where we were going to finish. Now some of that is out of our control.

“What we need to do is to make sure that on Friday night, we solidify home ice (in the playoffs). Wherever that may fall Saturday for Senior Night, it’s the unknown, but I do want to make sure that our No. 1 focus is playing well and playing well in this rivalry in that building.

“The standings and stuff like that will take care of itself. We need to go up to that arena and play well. It’s a hard place to do it, but that’s kind of going to be the mantra this week is to get our win up in Tech.”

That also may have been the mantra last weekend as well, except it was to beat the Lakers at the Berry Events Center. By sweeping LSSU, the Wildcats moved into sole possession of third place in the WCHA while trailing second-place Bowling Green State by just two points.

NMU also had to gut out a win Saturday, giving up the first goal, taking the lead, then letting the Lakers tie it before Sault Ste. Marie native Denver Pierce scored twice in the third period to complete the sweep.

“There was some adversity in the game on Saturday, giving up the first goal and being in complete control of the game and letting them claw back into it,” Potulny said. “We just stayed with it. I feel like we got a little bit of that confidence back that we’ve been lacking. The top guys had a great weekend, which is obviously very important going down the stretch. Atte (Tolvanen) also made some really important saves at really important times.”

Potulny said going into last weekend that he just wanted to see his team play well during the course of a weekend and that the feeling after completing the sweep was a “reward.”

“It was a tough weekend in Bemidji,” he said about a tie and loss at the Minnesota school on Feb. 15-16. “It’s been kind of a little bit of a tough stretch the second half of the year. It’s been kind of a tale of two stretches where we kind of had a bunch of success and won a few games in a row, then struggled a little bit along the way.

“We found a way to get some points, but we struggled. The last weekend (vs. LSSU) was the first weekend I feel that we played two good games. We’d play good games before maybe on a Saturday, but on the next Friday, we weren’t able to play well. It was the first complete weekend that we’ve had.”

Northern will try to pull off that second straight complete weekend when it travels to Houghton for a game at 7:07 p.m. today and returns to Marquette for Senior Night at 7 p.m. Saturday.