He arrived on campus at 8:30 Thursday morning, saw a gaggle of students sitting outside, nodded hello and walked quickly into his coach’s office.

Rand Pecknold hadn’t realized they were waiting for tickets to the first NCAA tournament hockey game in Quinnipiac history. He hadn’t realized those students had been camped out since 5 a.m. for the chance to see his team play Cornell Saturday at the Worcester Centrum.

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“I thought they were waiting for a P.E. class,” Pecknold said. “When someone told me, man, it was a special feeling.”

He is a man determined to savor the small gifts in life as well as the big ones, a man determined not to sweat the small aggravations. Rand Pecknold, 35, says he found his perspective in life six months ago, a morning not so different from Thursday.

There had been no pile of students that morning, only a pile of mail that he was sorting at 9:15 when baseball coach Dan Gooley asked him if he had heard about the plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Pecknold had thought he was talking about a Cessna or some small aircraft, but then he heard other concerned voices fill the hallway and he began to panic.

His wife, Nikki, works for Salomon Smith Barney. One office was at Seven World Trade, the other at 388 Greenwich St. He hurried to the phone in his office and began to dial. First her cell phone, then her office phone. Nothing. He ran to the television set and saw the horror.

“I went back to dialing,” Pecknold said. “I called her cell phone 250 times in one hour.”

There was no answer.

Nikki Bowler had met Pecknold at his sister’s wedding in New Hampshire. Pecknold and Nikki’s brother, Greg, were both in the wedding party and Rand didn’t have a date. Greg said, hey, his sister had just graduated from Duke. She was a two-time academic All-American field hockey player. Nikki and Rand went out after the rehearsal dinner and, well, there’s no time like a wedding to fall in love.

Nikki got into investment banking, earned an MBA from Yale last spring and began her new job in early August. Less than six weeks later, she was in an elevator when American Flight 11 slammed into One World Trade Center and her elevator across the street shook to a stop. Five or 10 seconds later, the elevator doors opened. Nikki could see debris falling.

“I thought, ‘Those poor pedestrians on the street,”‘ she said, “but then I went on my way trying to get where our training was on the 35th floor.”

She didn’t get far. Voices filled the hallways. A plane hit. No, it was a helicopter. Bodies filled the hallways and soon Nikki found herself jammed into the lobby at Seven World Trade. A co-worker had a BlackBerry, a wireless e-mail.

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“A colleague from London and one from Hong Kong e-mailed to tell her about the hijackers and a large plane,” Nikki said.

Only a few hundred yards away from the great tragedy of our time and Nikki discovered the truth from two people half a world away.

“I was way in the back of the lobby, but some people were pressed up against the window to see what was happening,” she said. ” Suddenly everybody ran away from the glass.”

A second plane, United Flight 175, had crashed into Tower Two.

A second felt like an hour, a minute a lifetime. Finally, the group filtered out of the lobby, down through the garage and outside.

“There was this false sense of security,” Nikki said. “We turned the corner and you’re right under One World. I looked up to see what was happening.”

What she saw were four people jumping to their death. The screams, the horrible result, shock and disbelief overwhelmed her.

She turned north, ran and kept running. As she closed in on her company’s main building on Greenwich street, she heard a van with a radio blaring. She stopped for a minute to listen for more news. There were shouts. She turned and saw the first building collapse.

At 10:30, Nikki reached her husband at Quinnipiac.

He wanted to drive to Manhattan immediately and get her. News reports told him it was impossible. His wife said it was impossible. Rand said he’d do it anyway. Finally, Nikki convinced him otherwise. Her brother-in-law’s brother, Mike Delacey, was in One Trade Center when it was hit. He escaped minutes before it collapsed. Nikki and Mike were able to hook up and later in the afternoon they took the ferry to his home in Jersey City. Later that day, Seven World Trade Center would also collapse.

Pecknold waited, drove over the Tappan Zee Bridge and 3 1/2 hours later reached Mike’s place. He was met in the early evening with a sight he could not believe.

“From the balcony, you can look straight across the Hudson at the smoke of where the World Trade Center was,” Rand said. “It was surreal.”

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He hugged his wife tight.

What Nikki had seen would keep her awake at night. “Good people jumping to their death,” she said. “It was the worst.” The nightmares would subside after a month, but she said she would question everything.

“I was deeply affected by Sept. 11, but for Nikki it was life-altering,” Pecknold said. “She helped some of our players find jobs on Wall Street and helped with their resumes. They knew she was down there. Right from that morning, a lot of the guys were worried about her.”

A coach’s wife sees all and knows even more. She sees her man win and lose and she suffers every inch of the trip with him. After Sept. 11, Nikki Bowler Pecknold’s eyes needed to see something special.

She returned to work in Manhattan within a few weeks, but she made sure to plan vacation days for the MAAC tournament at Holy Cross last week. And there she was Saturday, with Quinnipiac leading 5-4, her heart pounding with a key faceoff with 25 seconds left.

“I thought I was having my first heart attack at 28,” she said.

She laughed at her own medical hyperbole. Sports are good hyperbole, she already had seen the worst reality could offer. An empty-net goal pushed Quinnipiac into the NCAAs.

“What’s happened with the team this year has been so exciting,” she said. They’re so young. They have so many freshmen. This was supposed to be Rand’s rebuilding year.”

Pecknold considered the other NCAA teams … New Hampshire, Maine, Harvard. The MAAC allows only 11 scholarships, while the NCAA allows 18. Unlike the 65-team NCAA basketball tournament, hockey has only 12 teams. Quinnipiac is surrounded by storied powers.

“The last four days have been mind boggling,” Pecknold said. “I’ve got people calling me who I haven’t heard from in 15 years. I went to D’Angelo’s [sandwich shop] the other day and the kid behind the counter, who I’d never seen before, started talking about the MAAC finals. It was great.”

Six months later, the little things mean everything to Rand Pecknold.

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