Stacy Christensen first met his wife Kathie on St. Patrick's Day of 1975 when he was a junior at Saint John's University and she was a student at the College of Saint Benedict.
The pair hit it off right away, but they'd been dating for around eight months before he let her in on a secret he'd been keeping.
"I never told her anything about playing hockey," Christensen recalls.
In fact, he'd gone to great lengths to hide his athletic pursuits. Two weeks after they first met, he asked Kathie if she wanted to go to a dance club in nearby Avon known as Skeeters, and he happened to wear his SJU letter jacket.
"She said, 'I didn't know you were an athlete,'" he recounts. "I said, 'Oh this is my roommate's jacket - Jim Rothstein - he's a star hockey player for SJU from Grand Rapids.
"I never liked putting it out there that I was an athlete. I just wanted to be known as a normal guy.
But … eventually, Christensen had to let Kathie in on his secret.
"As we got close to our first game of my senior season, I asked her if she'd ever been to a Saint John's hockey game before," he said. "She hadn't, so I said, 'Well, let's plan on going one of these days.' There were campus buses running back-and-forth to the Municipal Athletic Complex (in West St. Cloud) and I told her to take one and I'd meet her there."
"She came to that first game and I saw her walking in while we were already on the ice warming up. I pounded on the glass to get her attention and she about died."
If Kathie had that reaction to simply seeing her future husband in uniform, imagine what she thought once the puck dropped. For Christensen wasn't just any hockey player, but perhaps the greatest performer in school history.
The forward, out of now-defunct Minneapolis West High School, started for the Johnnies for four seasons, earning All-MIAC and All-America honors as a junior and senior. He finished his career with 142 career points, a school record at the time that lasted until 1996 and still good enough to rank him fourth in program history.
"He was a heckuva player," recalls Dave Igo, who was Christensen's teammate for his first two seasons, then his head coach as a junior and senior. "He was a real asset on those teams. Some guys just seem to have a knack for scoring and he was one of them."
What makes Christensen's accomplishments even more remarkable is that he played at a time when SJU was not exactly a hockey power.
In fact, the program was still practicing and playing outdoors the season before he arrived on campus. It wasn't until his freshman year that the St. Cloud Civic Arena (now known as Torrey Arena at the MAC) opened, making it at the time the only indoor ice sheet within a 30-mile radius.
The Johnnies defeated St. Cloud State in the first game played in the facility on Nov. 21, 1972. Christensen scored a goal in that matchup to give his team 3-1 lead, but SJU struggled much of that season – hampered by only being able to practice an hour a day early in the morning (5 a.m. to 8 a.m.) because of the high demand for ice time at the new building.
John Ludwig had taken over as head coach, replacing Gaston Rheaume. Pat Kernan, a former player and assistant coach, had originally taken the position before having to relinquish it when he was accepted into law school.
"I had originally thought I'd go try to play juniors, but Kernan – who was a long-time friend of mine - called me out of the blue one summer day asking if I'd be interested in playing hockey at Saint John's because he was going to be the head coach," said Christensen (who finished with five goals and 10 assists that freshman year).
"I came up to Saint John's to play for Pat and he ended up leaving before the season started," he continued. "The first couple of years were pretty rough. We didn't have a lot of time to practice, and we had to be there early. It was a pretty big change from what I'd been used to during my high school years."
Nevertheless, Christensen led SJU in scoring with 15 goals and seven assists as a sophomore in 1973-74 when the Johnnies finished 6-13-1 – including a 21-0 loss to conference powerhouse Gustavus Adolphus.
Ludwig resigned at the end of that season and Igo – who had been playing goalie – took his place. Under his watch, and thanks to the emergence of Christensen as a superstar, SJU soon crawled its way back to respectability.
The Johnnies went 10-14 (8-8 in conference play) in 1974-75 and Christensen recorded 16 goals and 30 assists playing on a line with very talented younger players Rick Larson and Andy Overman.
"He had unbelievable vision," recalls Overman, who also played football for the Johnnies and is now a professor in the humanities and fine arts at Macalester. "The good guys know where the puck is going to go before the puck does. He always knew what was going to happen on the ice. He could anticipate things really well and set you up to do big things."
"He was an extremely unselfish player who made everyone around him better."
Christensen then closed his career with 29 goals and 14 assists as a senior in 1975-76, setting the school record for career points with two assists in a January matchup against St. Cloud State.
"Things turned around quite a bit during my junior and senior year," Christensen said. "Dave did a really good job as head coach, and he brought in some really talented young players. It was just a better atmosphere."
Longtime SJU head baseball coach Jerry Haugen, a standout in baseball and football for the Johnnies himself, was a classmate of Christensen (the two lived on the same floor freshman year) and the two have remained close friends ever since.
Haugen said Christensen's impact on the hockey program in those days cannot be overstated.
"He was easily the most gifted scorer and skater they had, and he was one of those guys who came in and made a big difference," said Haugen, who himself went on to coach hockey at SJU from 1977-81.
But as successful as he was on the ice, Christensen – a secondary education major – said hockey is not the first thing he thinks about when he looks back at his time in Collegeville.
"Hockey was important to me, definitely, but I'm most grateful for the friends - both men and women - I made at SJU/CSB and still regularly get together with at least three or four times a year," said Christensen, who lives in Minneapolis and has long run his own industrial filtration company based in Golden Valley.
"A couple of them were hockey players, but the rest weren't. The friendships that have stood the test of time are what I cherish the most. So the social part of my time there was as much a highlight as my wonderful experience of being able to play SJU hockey."
