Preview: Huskies And Badgers At Final Five [AUDIO]

St. Cloud State enters the WCHA Final Five as regular season champions for the first time in school history. They will take on the Wisconsin Badgers in a matinee Friday at Xcel Energy Center.

The Huskies and Badgers played against each other to close out the regular season in Madison, with the teams splitting a pair of games. The Huskies win in the Friday night contest clinched them a share of the MacNaughton Cup as WCHA champions.

The Badgers had a rough start to the season, starting just 1-7-3 in their first 11 games.  Since then Wisconsin has been one of the hottest teams in college hockey with a record of 19-4-4 over their final 27 games.

The Huskies were among the top teams in the conference all season long and ended in a tie with Minnesota for first place. Although the Huskies hold the tiebreaker for top seed in the Final Five, they will play the day game at the X. The WCHA and Xcel Energy Center have it written into their contract that the Gophers play the prime time game no matter what. Coach Bob Motzko says that was originally agreed upon to help ticket sales, but in the past few years the event has been popular enough to sell tickets without the scheduling quirk.

Of course making this matchup more interesting is the fact that the WCHA will be disbanding after this season, making this the final Final Five as we know it.

Minnesota and Wisconsin are branching off to found the Big Ten hockey conference along with MIchigan, Michigan State, Penn State and Ohio State.

St. Cloud State will join North Dakota, Colorado College, Denver, Minnesota-Duluth, Nebraska-Omaha, Miami (OH) and Western Michigan to form the National Collegiate Hockey Conference.

SCSU's Motzko joined Lee Voss and Dave Overlund on the Granite City Cafe to talk about the WCHA, the Final Five and about the Anchorage series. CLICK BELOW: