Roughrider goalie hopes to win championship of his own

CEDAR RAPIDS - There are no hard feelings, no remorse. Brady Hjelle is proud of the guys he used to play hockey with, and that's it.

No controversy here.

“They deserved it,” the Cedar Rapids RoughRiders goaltender said. “I know all those guys, obviously, and I'm happy for them.”

Hjelle is sitting out a transfer year from Minnesota-Duluth, playing with the RoughRiders and getting ready for the second half of his college hockey career at Ohio State.

UMD won the NCAA championship a couple of weeks ago, capping off a Cinderella run. Hjelle taped all the Bulldogs' postseason games on TV and watched them when he wasn't practicing or playing a game himself.

He was asked if he thought about what it would have been like had he stayed at Duluth and been part of the title team.

“Obviously, you'd have wanted to be there,” he said. “But I'm here, and I'm having a fun year here. So I have no regrets or anything like that.”

Already winning the Anderson Cup, having a legit shot at the Clark Cup and setting the United States Hockey League record for single-season victories isn't too bad a winter, either.

Hjelle won 40 of Cedar Rapids' 42 games en route to his record season, piling up a whopping 3,230 minutes in net. He ranked at or near the top in a bunch of categories: record (40-8-5), shutouts (5), goals against average (2.21) and save percentage (.923).

The 20-year-old from International Falls, Minn., who played the 2007-08 season in Cedar Rapids,  has been the rock of a RoughRiders club that set a franchise record for regular-season points and tied the record for victories.

Cedar Rapids plays Game 4 of its USHL second-round playoff series tonight at 6:15 at Muskegon.

“It just means that we have a really good team this year,” Hjelle said of his season. “Guys have been doing the job in front (of the net) the whole year. We've been consistent, and hopefully we can carry that into the playoffs here.”

He admitted playing as much as he did wore him down at times, but he just kept going.

“Yeah, it gets a little tiring,” he said. “But sometimes you've just got to go out there and have fun. I was able to do that most of this year.”