A few days before his last chance to do something that hadn’t been done in 54 years, Cam Lyden got a text.
Bryce Lyden got two opportunities to win New Canaan’s first boys’ hockey state title since 1972. They came, and after lifeless losses at M&T Bank Arena in back-to-back seasons, they went. To understand just how crazy a title drought of that length was, consider that the list of players who failed to end it included John Emmons, who played 75 NHL games, and Max Pacioretty, who played 939. That New Canaan is arguably the most hockey-crazed town in Connecticut; its girls’ program has won nearly half of the state titles ever handed out in the state. That the Rams lost nine state championship games between 1973 and 2025 without winning one.
“I grew up in New Hampshire,” head coach Clark Jones said over a chuckle. “So I’m like: ‘What in the world?’ Everybody’s talking about this.”
The digits 1, 9, 7 and 2 defined New Canaan boys’ hockey. Which is perhaps what compelled Bryce Lyden to reach out to his younger brother, with a word of wisdom he might never have realized during his own NC career, as Cam prepared for the Rams’ third consecutive championship game.
“Visualize yourself making the simple play,” the text to Lyden read. “Not the historic play.”
The Rams did, indeed, get the monkey off their back on March 23 in a 3-1 victory over Fairfield Prep at Quinnipiac, and if you ask Lyden, the reason New Canaan finally ended the drought is because New Canaan finally stopped trying to end the drought.
This is not a story about talent. The Rams knew they had the team to win it all early, but they knew that in 2024 and 2025, too. A drought half a century long has a way of pushing skill to the side.
Someone once told Jones to look up at the rafters in New Canaan’s home rink. He found 22 (about to be 23) Fairfield County Interscholastic Conference championship banners and, somewhere in there, just the one honoring a state title. “You can’t hide from it,” Jones told me. Not when it’s literally hanging over you.
“It becomes psychological,” Jones said. “It’s trying to get players to realize: There’s no pressure when you’re prepared. And you are prepared. And you’re really good.”
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It is no secret that New Canaan felt the heat in 2024 and 2025. Senior co-captain Rogan Lowe recalled a distinct feeling he felt in his chest before those two state final losses, how his mind couldn’t stop dwelling on making tape-to-tape passes and stick-handling, even though, “obviously, I know how to make tape-to-tape passes,” as Lowe (24 goals, 34 assists) put it. Lyden (two goals, 15 assists) wasn’t exactly sure how to explain it — he figured there must be some kind of science behind it — but he remembered the nerves simply killing his legs. He’s an elite athlete, about to join Bryce on the Michigan lacrosse team, but in the ‘24 and ‘25 title games, he was tired and lackadaisical from the jump without knowing why. “It’s almost like: You get too close to your goal, and you freeze,” Lowe said. New Canaan went down without much of a fight, in 4-1 losses to Notre Dame-West Haven and then chief rival Darien.
“The moment,” Lyden admits, “was too big for us.”
It is, certainly, important to recognize the company that a New Canaan boys’ hockey player keeps. It is just not just Pacioretty and Emmons who remain around the program in supportive roles. Jones, who played at Union, owns a rolodex filled with former NHL players; he started hosting an annual golf outing to raise money for the program in 2018. Trevor Zegras and Spencer Knight have shown up, and Kevin Shattenkirk is expected to attend this year. Jones reckons each golf trip raises $70,000, which he uses to pay for ice time and slots at Prentiss Hockey Performance, a training facility for a host of NHL players. Earlier this year, NC assistant coach Dave Ives started emailing a weekly newsletter to program alumni and boosters; by the end of the season, Jones told me, there were 500 people on the email chain.
All of this could easily be perceived as yet another source of pressure. But Jones insists it is not. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.
“It’s not like the boosters at the University of Alabama,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of hockey knuckleheads that want to hang out.”
In theory, the New Canaan team itself should operate under the same ethos. Lowe and Lyden, and plenty of their teammates, are lacrosse players first (Lowe will play at Colgate in the fall). Lowe does not practice several times a week, attend lifts and film sessions with his teammates and play 25 games in the span of three and a half months to further his athletic and academic career. He does it because he just enjoys hockey. This was something he reminded himself of constantly throughout NC’s playoff run in ‘26.
“I wasn’t trying to tell myself that all the work I’ve put in was to win the state championship,” Lowe said. “Because it wasn’t. It was because I love it. And that’s why I play.”
But 54 years is 54 years. A number that big can be a black hole, even if Lowe, Lyden and their teammates had nothing to do with the 1972 team or 90 percent of the teams that came after it. That’s how a group of players that are really just playing hockey for the fun of it found themselves completely enthralled with getting a specific result.
“We were hyper-fixated,” Lyden said of the ‘24 and ‘25 title games, “on the making history part.”
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The nerves, predictably, followed.
“That’s the thing — you’re taking it as more than just the game that it is,” Lowe said. “You think about 54 years. You think about how my Dad was one year old in 1972, how my Mom wasn’t even alive. And you kind of forget that it’s just a game of hockey.”
Lyden talks for ages about the importance of visualization. He refers to a self-help book written by Jim Murphy called “Inner Excellence,” which briefly went viral last January when superstar Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver A.J. Brown was seen reading it on the sideline during a playoff game. It taught Lyden that, yes, the state of his mind is just as (if not more) important to athletic success than the state of his body. And it harped on the benefits of visualization — the way it can make Lyden a more consistent athlete, the way it can improve his confidence before games, how it essentially acclimatizes the mind to the nerves and stress of a big moment before it happens.
Lyden didn’t do any of this in ‘24 and ‘25. Or, at least, he didn’t do it well.
“My sophomore year, I didn’t visualize at all,” he said. “My junior year? I would get to the rink and visualize a toe-drag shot for the overtime game-winner.”
But as a senior, Lyden visualized exactly the kind of things that had fogged Lowe’s mind come game time the year prior. The simple plays. The tape-to-tape passes, the puck carries, the defensive-zone reads. Between a 4-0 semifinal victory over Simsbury on March 18 and the final on the 23rd, he did this every night. And when the message from Bryce urging him to continue arrived, he forwarded it to the entire team. Lowe, Lyden and the rest of the captains harped on the importance of visualization early and often; they were not about to show up to another title game unprepared for the moment.
Jones may not have been privy to the behind-the-scenes, psychological preparation of his players. But when he got to M&T Bank Arena on March 23, the fruits of New Canaan’s prep were apparent. All Jones had to do was exist in the same vicinity of his players, be it in the pregame locker room or during warmups, to know this year was different.
“It was so obvious,” Jones said.
Lowe had quite a night on that fateful Monday evening. He scored the title-clinching empty netter and assisted Drew Harmon’s game-winner. He was on the ice when the final buzzer sounded; his family hosted the team after the victory. But the moment Lowe said he’ll never forget happened during warmups. He stood there, the stands beginning to fill with nearly 5,000 fans, many of them NC alums and some, yes, former members of the 1972 team, and realized how different it felt. Lowe realized, right then and there, just how much he’d gotten better at handling it all. As the music blared at M&T Bank Arena, he wasn’t nervous. He was just freakin’ pumped.
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“We, and I,” he remembered thinking, “have come a long way from where we started.”
The soundtrack to New Canaan’s coming-of-age moment?
“The ‘Nokia’ Drake song,” Lowe said.
Naturally.
