I don’t want this to sound like what it is — which is me being only slightly less tacky than those people who parade around on Bascom Hill shoving banners in your face and asking you to sign petitions for their “save the world from computers” campaigns — but I, unfortunately, see no way around it.

This is a plea, and no matter how I present it, it’s going to come off as one.

But don’t write my plea off as easily as you push those hoodwinking hippies aside. This isn’t some nonsensical political cause and it’s not just another situation in which you can’t expect to possibly make any sort of difference.

This is a sports cause, and thus is infinitely more important than any socio-political garbage you could get yourself involved in. And this is a cause in which every person who gets involved can affect the outcome in a very meaningful way.

The Hobey Baker Memorial Award, which is given to college hockey’s best player every year, is currently in a preliminary selection round during which fan voting over the Internet (www.voteforhobey.com) helps to determine the ten players who will be considered finalists for the honor.

Let me repeat that … Fan voting over the Internet will help determine the ten finalists.

The flawed situation that this little system creates is that with less than a week left in voting, about half of the players that fans have put in the positions to become finalists are jokers from terrible teams like Michigan Tech and the University of Alabama–Huntsville (are you kidding me?), who, in many cases, aren’t even having great seasons.

Scott Munroe, from UA-H, for example, ranks tenth on the list with 17,890 points. It’s tough to imagine that the netminder is being rewarded for a season in which he has played less than half of his team’s games (15 of 31), has lost more than twice the number of games he has won (4 … in a terrible conference), has posted a goals against average that is just north of 3.4 and has barely saved more than 90% of the shots he has faced. Munroe must have one hell of a campaign going down in the dirty South.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin goaltender Bernd Brückler is in 18th place on the list of 75-some-odd candidates with 9,083 points, despite his miraculous performance this season that has turned the Ice Badgers from a non-factor in college hockey into the fourth-ranked team in the country.

Not to take anything away from an outstanding freshman class, a sophomore forward who has played as solidly as anyone on the team and good play from senior captains, but this is Brückler’s team, and without him nothing that is happening right now would be happening.

Wisconsin’s system is based on taking chances with its limited offensive punch, playing defense that prevents serious trouble, and relying on the goaltender to make huge saves after huge saves.

And it seems that as the season comes to its close, Brückler makes more of those saves every game. The junior has given up just two goals in the past four games to propel the Badgers into a first-round bye in the upcoming conference tournament. Before that, he stole a pair of wins from the nation’s top team in a series in which he faced over 20 shots more than the Fighting Sioux’s goaltenders.

Brückler has, moreover, done all of this while competing in a conference that — both in nationwide respect and in level of competition — is probably superior to any other conference in college sports right now. With seven teams ranked in the top ten nationally in the latest KRACH power rankings, the WCHA would be, in college basketball terms, something like an unholy conglomeration of the top ten teams in the ACC, SEC, Big East and Big Ten.

I can’t tell you with any sort of certainty that Brückler will win the WCHA MVP award this season (I think you’d have to be Jesus or Mel Gibson or something to be able to foresee that). But what I can tell you for certain is that he deserves the award. Leading the conference in minutes played, goals against average and save percentage, Brückler has the Badgers on the verge of a second-place finish in the WCHA (with a sweep of Minnesota–Duluth this weekend).

Whether the coaches screw up and deny him the award or not, Brückler is undeniably the most important player in this conference this year. If you’re the most important player in the WCHA and you’re not the most important player in college hockey, you’re damned-sure one of the top two or three.

Thus far, Brückler has not been recognized as one of the top ten.

But there is still time to remedy this situation. Every fan is allowed to vote for the award once per day (per e-mail address), and every first-place vote cast before the March 7th cutoff date counts as five points.

That means that only two or three thousand people need to vote in a single day to get Brückler into the top ten (he needs about 8,000 points to pass Munroe). But that’s not enough. Brückler should be blowing his competition out. He goes to a school with something like 40,000 students — he should be in first place in voting.

So go register to vote (it’ll take you a good 20 seconds) and vote early and often. Let’s show the country that Madison really is the sports town it’s cracked up to be.