NMU hockey coach Grant Potulny has been around a lot of hockey through his playing and coaching career of more than 20 years, but he’s never seen a player have as much success against their former team as Wildcat defenseman Trevor Cosgrove did against Colgate last weekend.

Cosgrove was named CCHA Defenseman of the Week for his three goals and one assist on the weekend in a pair of home wins for NMU against the visiting Raiders. 

“I’ve only done it in pro hockey, whether you’ve been traded or signed with a different team,” Potulny said. “When you play the old team in your mind, you’re going to have two goals and an assist on Friday and a goal on Saturday. It usually doesn’t work that way, so for him to actually have that happen, I think is something that when he looks back at his experience in college hockey, that’ll be one thing that I think he’ll remember forever.”

Some players transfer after a season or two, but Cosgrove played a career’s worth of games at Colgate in four years there. Northern associate head coach Byron Pool played defenseman at Colgate, and once Cosgrove got on his radar, the rest was history.

 In 131 games at Colgate, Cosgrove scored 13 goals and he already has six in a Wildcat uniform. The style of play from the ECAC is an older style of hockey with low-scoring slugfests, while Northern’s offensive style has let him get going, he said. After committing to NMU and seeing the schedule, Cosgrove saw a home series in early January that was different from any other.

“I had this circled on the schedule pretty much right when I knew I was coming here and saw the schedule come out,” Cosgrove said. “I’ve been looking forward to this game for pretty much as long as I was committed to Northern. It was just a lot of build-up coming up to the game, and there was a decent amount of stress of getting two wins against them.”

In the series opener on Friday, Jan. 7, Cosgrove scored or assisted on three of the Wildcats’ four goals in a 4-2 win over Colgate. The finale on Saturday, Jan. 8 was a 6-3 win for NMU, with a rocket off of Cosgrove’s stick in the second period giving him his third goal for the weekend.

“It’s pretty hard to describe, but definitely a little strange to play against guys who I played with for four years,” Cosgrove said. “It ended up being pretty special to be able to actually get two wins and score a couple of wins against them. That felt pretty good.”

It felt different than a normal game for Cosgrove, as this series meant a little bit more, he said. 

“I don’t think you could’ve drawn it up any better, I got pretty lucky with a couple of bounces with the puck going in from center ice,” Cosgrove said. “The weekend couldn’t have gone better for me, so it was pretty lucky.”