Believe it or not, the college-hockey season is already nearing the quarter pole.

Following Friday night’s game against Colorado College, the Minnesota State men’s team will have completed 25 percent of its regular-season games.

While it still feels like it’s early in the season — and, for the most part, it is — enough games have been played to help or hurt a team’s position come March when everybody’s got his or her slide rules out in order to decipher the Pairwise Rankings.

This week, MSU finds itself in a not-so-familiar spot. It’s November, and the Mavericks are in the thick of the race, not at the back of the pack. And the nation’s 11th-ranked team likes the company it’s keeping.

“Our record is better than it has been (at this time in past seasons),” coach Troy Jutting said.

Habitual slow starts have been somewhat of a sore subject for the Mavericks’ coach, but there has been no denying the results. This is MSU’s 10th season in the Western Collegiate Hockey Association, and it has a winning record (4-2-2 overall) through eight games for just the second time in that span. The last one came in 2001-02.

This year’s seniors — Mick Berge, Blake Friesen, Brian Kilburg, Dan Tormey and Mike Zacharias — undoubtedly remember the 1-6-1 start from their freshman year, which included a pair of losses at Bemidji State. A year later, they were 2-6-0 with two home losses to the Beavers.

“To start out 1-5, 0-6, those are huge holes to climb out of,” Berge said. “We’d finish strong then look back and say, ‘Wow, if we would have won one more game.’ We just put ourselves in a hole.”

The Mavericks opened this season by sweeping Bemidji and have been pretty solid since, save the final 10 minutes of their Oct. 18 game against North Dakota when they blew a 2-0 lead and lost 4-3 on a last-second goal.

Last weekend, Minnesota State took three points for the WCHA standings with a win and a tie on the road against a much-improved Alaska-Anchorage team.

Even as the result gave it a bump in the national polls, no one on the MSU team was bragging about the accomplishment this week, though. Most agreed, they just as easily could have lost a couple of games.

Jutting chalked up the success to his team’s maturity and experienced, compared to the young lineups he’s had to put on out on the ice the last couple of seasons. Junior Trevor Bruess said talent alone got them through the weekend, most notably the goaltending of Mike Zacharias.

“We gotta get better — no question,” Jutting said. “But I do like the fact that we were down in an opponent’s rink, against a team that’s been playing very well — down 2-nothing in the second period — and still had the ability to come back and score five goals and win the hockey game.”

The Mavericks won the opener 5-2 then tied the Seawolves 2-2 in overtime. In the second game, MSU led 2-0 after one period but was outshot 33-14 for the game.

“We had seven shots after two periods,” Berge said. “But we came out with three points on a long road trip. You gotta look at that as a positive. Most teams would have done that and got swept.”