ORONO — Right now, it’s a construction zone. If you close your eyes, you can see what it will be by the end of the year. The locker rooms that will be home to the University of Maine men’s and women’s hockey teams are on opposite sides of the hallway. They’ll go down the hall, take a right, then a left, and the Black Bears will be on the Alfond Arena ice, in front of thousands of fans cheering and singing the Maine Stein Song.

The renovations to Alfond Arena are on schedule and should be complete by the end of the year. New locker rooms, meeting rooms, video rooms, training space and team lounges for the players. New offices for the coaching staffs of the two UMaine hockey teams. For fans, a new entrance to the arena, new concessions, and a new team store.

It’s all coming thanks to $170 million from the Harold Alfond Foundation and more from other donors. To this point, the Alfond Arena renovations are the most visible of the many athletic facility upgrades at the University of Maine. A new softball field opened in 2023, followed by a new field hockey field. Already, there have been upgrades at Alfond Arena, including a new scoreboard over center ice. A soccer pitch and track and field complex will open this fall. Down the road, a basketball arena should open for the 2027-28 season, and upgrades are coming to Alfond Stadium, home of the football team.

All of it is long overdue, and it signifies that, finally, the University of Maine takes its status as the only Division I college athletic program in the state seriously.

When the initial Alfond Foundation gift of $90 million was presented in 2020, it was a godsend. The University of Maine was really just playing at being a Division I program. There was some success, to be sure — some teams competed for conference titles and the football team made a run to the Football Championship Subdivision semifinals in 2018 — but anyone could look at the facilities the Black Bears called home and see very little of it passed the Division I eyeball test.

Memorial Gym, better knows as the Pit, is a loud and miserable place for opponents to play, but it’s not a Division I-caliber arena and hasn’t been for decades. Alfond Arena needed extensive upgrades. Now the athletic director at UMass Lowell, former UMaine softball coach Lynn Coutts made it a point to not show recruits Kessock Field, the team’s home until a new facility opened two years ago. Coutts didn’t sell recruits on the facility. She sold them on the school and expectations. She sold what could be, not what was.

With new facilities across the board, current Maine coaches don’t have to hide anything behind a promise of potential.

“It’s paramount. You have to have it. It doesn’t have to be the top notch to everyone, but you’ve got to be in that top third, certainly in our league, Hockey East, to be able to compete. We’re trying to win a national championship on the men’s and women’s side in hockey,” said Maine athletic director Jude Killy, as he stood in what will be men’s hockey coach Ben Barr’s new office when construction is complete. “To do that, you’ve got to have the caliber of facility that’s going to attract appropriate talent, and provide you with the resources to do that.”

Fans will not see a lot of the new construction at Alfond Arena. It’s all the stuff behind the scenes designed to attract the things the fans will see — talented athletes on the ice, competing to hang more banners from the rafters.

That’s the plan, Killy said. Each construction project is undertaken with the dual goal of making the fan experience better, in facilities that will attract athletes who Black Bear fans will enjoy supporting. Change takes time, but the sense is that things are changing with UMaine athletics, for the better. No longer is it a Division I program in name only.

“I don’t think there’s a person on our staff, that’s our support staff, our coaching staff, who takes any of this for granted. We’ve all been at different points in time and our career in different places and seen the evolutions of programs,” Killy said. “What we have here right now is special. It’s not just special because we’re winning. It’s special because of how the state has connected with our program and our university. And we want that to last forever.”

Forever starts by extending an invitation. As the facilities upgrades continue, the University of Maine is doing exactly that.