Just when we thought it was safe to pencil in Cornell and Harvard at the top and lay claim to our own, pint-sized version of a certain hardball rivalry, the “p” word is squatting in ECAC Country again.

Parity—not teams, not coaches, and not players—is back in control of the league.

After two seasons in which the Big Red and Crimson made NCAA tournament appearances, waged overtime ECAC championship games for the ages and infused unbridled puck passion into a dormant, decades-old rivalry, they’re right back where they started: in the middle of everyone else.

Harvard began the year as the nation’s sixth-ranked team and the consensus pick to win the league, but injuries, unmet expectations, and hard luck have doomed the Crimson to no better than a fifth-place finish.

Cornell, which won the ECAC title and reached the Frozen Four last season, has been limited by youth and injuries and is a long shot for a third straight Cleary Cup. It is currently in third place, needing four points and help to take the title.

So who has filled the power vacuum? Well, everyone.

Colgate—the same team that was picked to finish eighth in the preseason—needs only two points to clinch the regular-season title. But depending on what happens behind them, the Raiders could theoretically be swept this weekend and still take the title…with only 28 points.

By comparison, Cornell won last year’s championship with 39. Harvard was second with 35.

Colgate could become the first team since the league assumed its current 12-team format in 1984 to win the league with fewer than 31 points. (Prior to that, standings were determined by winning percentage.)

Even if the Raiders sweep this weekend, they will become one of only five teams to win the ECAC with 32 or fewer points, joining the 1991, 1995 and 2001 Clarkson teams and 1992 Crimson varsity.

In other words, Colgate might be the worst best team in ECAC history. And that is no disrespect to Stan Moore, an excellent hockey coach with boatloads of integrity who is a no-brainer pick for ECAC Coach of the Year.

It’s just that right now, his team is the best of a very balanced, woefully unspectacular field—a title that everyone expected would belong to Harvard or Cornell this season.

But alas, those who foretold an ECAC in which those carmine cousins nosed one another for the title each year—the same way Michigan and Michigan State have engaged in a two-way struggle for CCHA hegemony for most of the last two decades—are now sitting down to a happy helping of crow.

Now could one of them stage a dramatic run through the conference tournament, win the title in overtime, and make the NCAAs? Sure. We know how that works around here.

But do not mistake a year-end reversal of fortune—which is what that would be—for the continuation of the two-horse race we saw last season. That’s over now. A sort of mob rule on ice has taken its place.