WORCESTER, Mass. — The Holy Cross men's hockey team earned the top seed and a first-round bye in the Atlantic Hockey America playoffs by virtue of winning the regular season championship. The rested Crusaders will host American International in a best-of-three conference quarterfinal series this weekend.

Head coach Bill Riga said the bye allowed the team — which finished the regular season 19-5-2, holding off Sacred Heart by three points to win the conference crown — to both fine-tune its play and get a mental and physical break.

"Having a bye, really, it's the same thing as winning a playoff round, Riga said. "You get a chance to rest and heal injuries. [It's] obviously a big advantage, and then [you] have time to work on parts of your game that you haven't been able to work on a lot during the season with short weeks. So it's a little six-on-five or five-on-six or four-on-four, something like that where you don't have a lot of time to work on it, so you have an extra week to work on little things that happen in a game."

Forward Matt Kursonis echoed his coach's comments, saying the top seed and the bye were helpful.

"[We can] rest some guys who were contributors and major factors that were playing through injuries," Kursonis said. "It's a grind mentally and physically, and just being able to reset and focus on some things that maybe we steered away from, that play into our identity, is something that should be helpful for us as a team."

Game 1 of Holy Cross' best-of-three quarterfinal series at the Hart Center is Friday at 7 p.m. Game 2 is Saturday at 7, and Sunday's game if necessary is at 5. AIC beat Rochester Institute of Technology 2-1 in overtime last Friday to reach the quarterfinals.