Working on a story for Friday's dead-trees edition of the paper, but might as well get some info flowing through the series of tubes about UAA's WCHA series at St. Cloud State this weekend.

The Seawolves will be without three key players -- second-leading scorer Tommy Grant (sprained knee), usual first-line center Nick Haddad (hip) and all-situations defenseman Brad Gorham (knee).

Based on what I saw at practice Tuesday -- and, remember, lines are always subject to change -- looks like Alex Gellert will move up to center Josh Lunden and Kevin Clark on the first line. The line of Daniel Naslund centering Mickey Spencer and Sean Wiles looked to stay together. The other lines had Curtis Leinweber moving to the pivot to center Mitch Bruijsten and Tyler Currier, and Craig Parkinson centering Jade Portwood and Chris Crowell.

Long-time Seawolves fans no doubt know the program's history -- or lack thereof -- at the National Hockey Center in St. Cloud. By my math, not my strong suit, UAA is 0-25-3 in that building since its first trip inside the concrete bunker in February 1991. UAA has lost three times in OT at the NHC.

UAA's winless-in-28 history at the NHC includes a 0-0 tie there on Nov. 22, 1997, when almost nothing of note happened in the game -- seriously, the most boring games I've ever witnessed -- until UAA goaltender Doug Teskey flashed his right leg at the OT buzzer and made a skate save after a St. Cloud dude taking a draw to Teskey's left fired picked the face-off out of mid-air and unloaded a bullet on net. Just remember that St. Cloud State beat writer Mike "Killer'' Killeen and I breathed a sigh of relief -- mostly because Teskey was a good talker, so was UAA captain Stacy Prevost, who lost that draw, and so was whoever that dude was that took the shot (I've got a clipping of the story in the basement, but I ain't feelin' that motivated on an alleged day off; thankfully, Kevin Allenspach of the St. Cloud Times isn't so lazy -- he says the dude in question was Jason Stewart, who I'll raise a glass to soon for saving me from filing a one-sentence story that would have read: "The Seawolves tied St. Cloud State in the most boring game people ever spent money to watch -- I'm going out with Killer.''). Killer and I pretty much wrote our entire stories about the last second of the game. And I sure we then departed the NHC in search of hydration.

By the way, you can find Allenspach's blog here. (We writers have to pimp the other guy's blog occasionally so we generate Web hits to satisfy the suits).