The year was 1959 and the University of North Dakota’s Fighting Sioux hockey team was on the brink of its first college final in team history.
However, unbeknownst to most in attendance that March day in Troy, N.Y. was the fact three players from Fort Frances would play an integral part in the outcome.

In the semi-finals, UND and St. Lawrence University went to sudden death overtime tied at 3-3 before Fort Frances-born Guy LaFrance pounced on the puck and scored at 4:22 of the extra frame to send the Fighting Sioux to a final showdown with Michigan State.
In the final, the stage was set for more theatrics with another 3-3 score going into sudden death. This time, teammate Reg Morelli would duplicate LaFrance’s heroics—scoring the OT winner en route to the school’s first national title.
“We got a couple lucky breaks and the winning goal was actually scored off of a rebound,” recalled LaFrance, who finished his UND career with 93 points in 93 games.
“We all jumped on the ice and celebrated, and then on our way home we stopped off in New York for a day and celebrated some more,” LaFrance added.
“They have a great program [at UND, and we’d like to think we started it,” he laughed.
LaFrance, 71, was joined by two other Fort Frances players on that team, Julian Brunetta and the late Ron King, who all grew up playing hockey in this area.
The team’s manager, Ted Kotyk, also hailed from Fort Frances while Joe Armbruster had graduated from the UND team just a year prior.
Armbruster, King, and Brunetta suited up together at the Juvenile (16-18) age level prior to university with the Fort Frances Jaycees, who went on to win the Manitoba-Thunder Bay championship.
“I was the first one down there from town and the school was looking for players and I told them, ‘Hey, we had this team and these guys are pretty good’ and it just worked out that they came down,” noted Brunetta, who wore an ‘A’ on his jersey as one of the team’s most reliable defencemen in his final year at UND.
“It was an interesting year because I think we had about seven overtime games that we ended up winning,” he added.
Brunetta would move west to Vancouver, B.C. for a few years after completing his post-secondary studies, but would find his way back to Fort Frances soon after.
He became the first coach of the Muskie boys’ hockey team during their inaugural season in 1964, and would teach at Fort Frances High School for 30 years.
“I’m a Fort Frances guy through and through,” Brunetta remarked.
LaFrance took a slightly different path, choosing to pursue hockey further after completing his degree at UND.
He signed on to play with the Minneapolis Millers of the International Hockey League the following season, tallying 21 goals and 32 assists in 72 regular-season games.
“It [the IHL] was a real dirty league,” LaFrance recalled. “The National [Hockey] League only had six teams at that time, so there were a lot of guys coming down from that league and trying to hang on and make money, and it just made for a real dirty league.”
Unfazed by that experience, LaFrance would take his skills overseas, spending the next three years coaching and playing the sport he loved in Austria.
“We played against Czech teams, Swedish teams, German teams, and travelled to Italy and Switzerland—and even went behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ playing in Hungary and Czechoslovakia,” LaFrance noted from his summer home on Hopkins Bay of Rainy Lake.
“That was a real great experience for me.”
LaFrance would return to North America in 1964, taking a job in Rochester, Mn. with his old hockey buddy, Ron King, who recently passed away.
“I started work at the Ability Building Center because my degree was in social work,” LaFrance recalled. “Ron was a director and I worked under him, training people for work in the hotel and service industry because Rochester has lots of hotels.”
LaFrance would move back to Europe on a few occasions afterwards to accept other hockey opportunities before eventually settling down in Minneapolis.
“After I got back from Europe and officially retired from hockey, I scouted part-time for the Quebec Nordiques for four years while also working for Jostens,” he noted.
“I covered college and high school hockey in Minnesota, and was at the draft when we picked Joe Sakic and also was involved in the big trade where [Eric] Lindros went to Philadelphia and we got [Peter] Forsberg.
“The Nordiques came out real good in that one,” LaFrance said.
LaFrance, who worked for 25 years with Jostens, recently moved from Minneapolis to Louisville, Ky. to spend more time with his grandchildren.
He and his wife, Linda, have a summer home on Rainy Lake while Brunetta and his wife, Sandra, live here year-round—maintaining a constant connection with their roots in the town where they first laced up their skates.