Good sweep. The Irish did what they absolutely

needed to do, take two from a struggling team. It was good to see some offense again and we only trailed for about 2 minutes all weekend.

Grain of salt time though, Penn State has almost always been a defense optional team. They've given up more goals this season than all but a handful of teams. They've allowed 28 goals already in 5 January games, so you're SUPPOSED to put up 4 or 5 goals a game at home against these guys. Can we do this against teams not named Penn State, or Ohio State?

I'm trying hard to find reasons for optimism in the program and one small victory is the freshman scoring. 23 goals in 26 games. A damn sight better than the last couple of seasons, when the freshman classes may as well have been playing somewhere else. This holds to this day as all of the sophomore and junior players recruited by Notre Dame have just 11 goals among them in total.

Hopefully also the freshmen aren't simply hitting their peak. Hunter Stand is the lone player among the 2nd and 3rd year players who had a decent freshman season, potting 8 goals in 40 games in 2021-2022. But in 63 games since he has managed just 8 more goals. You have to recruit and you have to develop. More players than not should be better as juniors or seniors than they were as freshmen.

We're 5-1-2 against the bottom two teams in the conference and 0-4 against the ones in the top two spots. 6 of our final 8 games are against teams with better conference records than our seemingly yearly .500 mark. If this team doesn't want to see the season pissed away and ending before the middle of March it's going to require beating teams that don't suck. That means scoring goals against teams that don't suck. We're more than a goal a game better against OSU and PSU than we are against the other 4 teams.