GRAND FORKS, N.D. --  Somebody must have called to order the true bluebloods of college hockey.

How else can one explain that in just under a week from now, in Las Vegas, the four teams with the most NCAA championships to their credit all advanced the Frozen Four, I believe maybe for the first time since the first NCAA tourney was held in 1948?

Yes, the hockey heavyweights in terms of championship success will battle it out when Denver, Michigan and Wisconsin join the Fighting Hawks beginning on April 9 when the Frozen Four convenes in Nevada.

Will Denver, with the most NCAA titles with 10, the last in 2024, add to that total?

Will Michigan, with 9 titles but none since 1998, come out on top to tie the Pioneers for most ever? 

Will the Fighting Hawks, with as balanced of a team as there is in college hockey, claim title No. 9 and creep within one more title of tying Denver for most ever?

Or will Wisconsin, looking for its second title in 10 years, get by the Fighting Hawks in the semifinals in Nevada and a chance to close the gap on the title-winning leaders?

There's always something different to be found in the Frozen Four makeup, if one digs deep enough.

How about going back to 2005, when four teams from then the Western Collegiate Hockey Association -- North Dakota, Colorado College, Minnesota and the champion that year, Denver, made it a Frozen Four? Four from one league? Remarkable.

Those are unusual happenings indeed, and who knows when or if they will happen again?

Closer to home, will UND first-year head coach Dane Jackson follow the history books at North Dakota and win an NCAA title in his first year or very early as the bench boss of the Fighting Hawks?

Jackson's predecessor at UND, Brad Berry, brought home a national championship in his first tournament as head coach in 2016.

Going back in school history, much of the same can found in previous coaches of title teams as North Dakota.

Bob May, in his second year as head coach at UND, guided his team to the school's first NCAA title in 1959.

Barry Thorndycraft, who replaced May as head coach in 1959-60, took the Fighting Sioux to the NCAA championship in 1963 in his fourth year behind the bench.

The trend for early success for UND coaches continued down the line.

Gino Gasparini guided UND to the NCAA title game in 1979, then won his first of three NCAA championships in his second year with the Sioux in 1980.

Skip ahead a few years and we find Dean Blais an early title winner behind the UND bench. He skippered UND to the national championship in 1997, in his third year as head coach. That team won a school-record 40 games, losing just eight. He won another title as coach in 2000.

And in 2016, in Brad Berry's first year as coach after replacing Dave Hakstol, UND outscored Northeastern, Michigan, Denver and Quinnipiac by a whopping combined margin of 20-7 in those four games NCAA playoff games for title No. 8 for North Dakota.

Of note, the assistant head coach on that team was the same Dane Jackson who will be chasing his title in Nevada in his first year as the head man.

UND has won national championships three times in Providence, R.I., once each in Troy, N.Y., Chestnut Hill, Mass., Detroit, Milwaukee and Tampa and now looks to add Nevada as the seventh state in which it has won it all.

And in a gambling state like Nevada, the odds might be good that another coach early in his career as head coach brings home another NCAA title to UND.

I wouldn't bet against it!

Virg Foss has reported on UND hockey since 1969, first for the Grand Forks Herald, and since his retirement from the newspaper in 2005, for UND Media Relations.