Minnesota Wild defenseman Brock Faber finished second in the Calder Trophy award voting, given to the league’s best rookie as part of the NHL awards show on Thursday night. Faber, 21, finished second to Chicago’s Connor Bedard.

Bedard finished with 1,808 points in the voting on the backing of 152 first-place votes. Faber earned 42 first-place votes, 146 second-place votes along with six other down ballot votes to tally 1,464 total points in the voting. New Jersey defenseman Luke Hughes had 686 votes.

Faber, the former University of Minnesota star from Maple Grove, Minn., had eight goals and 39 assists while playing all 82 games last season for the Wild. His 24:58 average time on ice led all rookies. He was also first among rookies in blocked shots (150), tied for first in assists and was tied for second in points (47). Bedard, the No. 1 overall pick in last year’s draft, had 22 goals and 39 assists in 68 games.

Former Gopher Logan Cooley, playing for the Arizona Coyotes, was fifth in the voting. Wild forward Marco Rossi was sixth.

Rossi, 22, joined Faber on the NHL all-rookie team. The all-rookie team was comprised of Bedard, Cooley, Rossi at forward; Faber and Hughes at defense and Carolina goaltender Pyotr Kochetkov on the rookie team.

Rossi had 21 goals and 19 assists while playing all 82 games. Faber and Rossi join Kirill Kaprizov and Jonas Brodin as the only players in Wild history to be named to the all-rookie team.

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PHOENIX — The Twins approached the halfway mark in their season on Thursday afternoon, following the conclusion of their 13-6 rout of the Arizona Diamondbacks.

They did so in second place, 7 1/2 games behind the Cleveland Guardians after Thursday’s win, though playing at a 90-win pace after a topsy-turvy first half.

“I think we’ve put ourselves in a good position to go forward,” manager Rocco Baldelli said. “We’ve done everything that we want to do to this point.”

The first half was defined by their streakiness. During their longest winning streak, the Twins (45-36) bonded over a package of encased sausage that provided one of Major League Baseball’s weirder storylines.

After a 7-13 start, the Twins pulled themselves up and rattled off 12 straight wins, during which they rallied around a Cloverdale sausage that was left in the clubhouse by infielder Kyle Farmer, who had done some promotional work for the company last year.

In mid-May, they plunged into a seven-game losing streak, eventually having a players-only meeting in Washington after a 12-3 drubbing.

Other streaks would follow in June — a five-game losing streak, a six-game winning streak. But the Twins have settled in and have been one of the best hitting teams of late.

“There are going to be areas that we can improve on,” Baldelli said. “A lot of those improvements are going to be kind of fine improvements and fine-tuning things and making small adjustments each day depending on what’s going on with individual players and the team. All that’s true. But we’ve been ready to play in the first half, which is mainly what I want to see.”

And yet, they’re still far behind in the division, something that Baldelli said nobody within the clubhouse is worrying about, seeing as it is out of their control.

While Cleveland has been among the best teams in the major leagues, the Twins still are well positioned to make a run at the playoffs, currently second in the wild card standings.

“We’re in a good spot. We could be in a better spot,” shortstop Carlos Correa said. “Obviously we’re not leading the division … but I feel good with where we’re at as a team. I feel good with the strides we made the last mont, and we’re trending the right way.”

Briefly

The Twins will head to Seattle to face the West-leading Mariners for three games over the weekend. The Twins took three of four games from the Mariners when they met last month. … Bailey Ober, Pablo López and Joe Ryan are set to pitch against the Mariners. … The Twins optioned reliever Ronny Henríquez to Triple-A to make room on the roster for David Festa, who made his major league debut on Thursday.

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With “Suor Angelica,” Out of the Box Opera guides its audience through three different spaces within the Basilica of Saint Mary. It’s a credit to artistic director David Lefkowich for using the mood of each area to help tell the redemption story.

In the 1918 one-act opera, composer Giacomo Puccini and librettist Giovacchino Forzano construct a story highlighting Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s investigation of prayer within his narrative poem “Purgatorio,” the second part of the larger work “La Commedia” (later renamed “The Divine Comedy”).

In the poem, Dante’s version of himself — the Pilgrim — encounters all sorts of sinners at various levels of purgatory who sing hymns and pray as they hope to move out of that liminal space into heaven.

The opera centers around a formerly wealthy woman who now lives in a convent. In the face of tragedy and grief, Suor Angelica must face up to her past mistakes. Through prayer she finds spiritual reclamation.

Out of the Box Opera has found an apt partner in The Basilica of Saint Mary, a venue that helps accentuate the opera’s spiritual themes, while also adding to the story’s gravitas.

OOTB often brings opera to nontraditional spaces. The company has performed in places like Uppercut Boxing Gym in Northeast Minneapolis and the Pillsbury A-Mill. In 2022, it produced its version of Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata” in different spaces through the Canopy hotel in downtown Minneapolis.

This production starts in the basement. Before the show, various nuns wander about as the orchestra sets up at the front of the audience. A very loud drum followed by the sound of bells mark the start of the show, and then a group of nuns gather on the balcony behind the audience, singing “Ave Maria.” Soon, we meet Suor Angelica, played by Alexandra Loutsian. The other sisters suspect she might have a secret past.

“Suor Angelica” is a bit unusual as an opera in that there are no male performers. The cast is made up entirely of higher voices. At first, Loutsian brings a masculine energy, with her throaty lower register. Later, Loutsian reveals her range. Her voice raises to higher notes as her plight becomes more urgent and dire.

In the second scene, Angelica meets with her aunt, La Zia Principessa (played by Alice Chung) in a chapel. The chapel is the smallest of the three spaces, and on the sold-out opening night, it got pretty crowded. An usher or two — perhaps Virgil himself, Dante’s guide through Purgatory, could have helped get the crowd to move past the doors and spread out through the room.

The chapel scene has the most dramatic tension of the story, with two strong-willed women facing off in a high-stakes negotiation, with a devastating reveal at the end of the scene. As the aunt, Chung brings a searing viciousness — both vocally and with her character portrayal. Loutsian, who contains her emotions throughout the first scene and much of the second, finally erupts.

There’s a payoff that comes with the third scene, which takes place in the nave — or the central part of The Basilica. With the majestic setting and magnificent acoustics, the location adds to the climactic nature of the story and the music. Lefkowich takes advantage of the grand setting with a surround-sound approach to the voices and a bit of stage magic to make a miracle happen.

Meanwhile, music director and conductor Stephen Hargreaves guides the small orchestra into a wonderful sound that shifts from intimate to profound throughout the show.

If you go

What:  “Suor Angelica” produced by Out of The Box Opera and the Basilica of Saint Mary

When: 2 p.m. Saturday

Where: The Basilica of Saint Mary, 88 N 17th St., Mpls.

Tickets: $101

Capsule: This processional performance builds as it moves through different spaces of the Basilica of St. Mary.

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