Walk out of the Arizona State locker room at the sparkling new Mullett Arena (yes, it’s a hockey rink named Mullett; laugh it up) and make a left before you hit the tunnel to the ice (past the full-wall rendering of the lovably decrepit and ironically named Oceanside Arena, with its too-low ceiling and wonky boards) and you’ll see a dark hallway (hey, they’re still working on getting all the overhead lights to work).

On the wall on the right side, there are 32 black plaques, each emblazoned with the logo of an NHL team. It’s a place to honor all the Arizona State hockey players who have made it to the NHL. Twenty-nine of them are empty, and the only reason it’s not 30 is that Joey Daccord has played for both the Senators and the Kraken.

“He’s doing his best to fill up the board on his own,” laughed Josh Doan, ASU sophomore and son of Coyotes great Shane Doan.

The wall — all hope and optimism with a touch of that quintessentially collegiate arrogance — captures the giddy atmosphere that surrounds the Arizona State men’s hockey program, four games into its eighth season of existence. The Sun Devils still don’t have a conference, and they’re four years removed from their first and only NCAA tournament appearance, but they now have a spectacular new rink in which to play and their eyes set on not only hosting Frozen Fours in the future, but playing in them.

And they envision a future in which ASU alumni dot the NHL landscape.

“That’s what everyone wants, especially when you’re building a program,” fifth-year senior Demetrios Koumontzis said. “You go to other places for road games and you see all the names on everyone’s walls. We only have a couple right now, but when you come back to this building 20 years from now, it’s going to be really cool to see those names, and to know you were a part of that.”

Of course, the Sun Devils don’t need to wait 20 years for NHL players to roam the carpeted hallways of Mullett Arena. The Arizona Coyotes are practicing at the rink on Thursday and hosting the Winnipeg Jets there on Friday. It’s no one-off, either — no neutral-site game, no bone being thrown to ASU to raise awareness of the program. The Tempe campus of Arizona State and the spiffy-but-small Mullett Arena — with its 5,026-fan capacity, a number which includes some 180 standing-room-only spots — will be the Coyotes’ full-time home for at least the next three seasons, possibly more, as they work to build their own arena a couple miles away.

And while the rest of the NHL might be pointing and laughing at the idea of a professional franchise in the world’s best hockey league being a mere tenant of a college hockey team’s rink, the Sun Devils are beaming with pride.

“We built this thing as well as we could,” said Frank Ferrara, ASU’s chief financial officer and senior associate athletic director, a longtime executive with the NFL who was the university’s chief liaison with the Coyotes. “We want this to be an elite NCAA facility. Just the fact that an NHL team is willing to play here validates everything we’ve done.”

So how did it get to this point? And how will it all work? Let’s break it down.