St. Lawrence scored five straight goals during a 6-3 romp over the Cornell Big Red on Saturday night at Lynah Rink.
St. Lawrence (9-8-4, 6-2-3 ECAC) also defeated Colgate on Friday night to take four points on the road during the weekend.
The night started on a good note for Cornell (9-6-4, 7-3-2), as junior David Kozier scored a power-play goal just 3:34 into the game. The Saints evened the game with a marker at 4:42 of the first when a loose puck came out of the corner to St. Lawrence’s Matt Desrosiers, who blasted a shot past senior goaltender Ian Burt.
Cornell junior Denis Ladouceur gave the Red the lead back just after the half-way mark of the opening stanza, with assists from seniors Dan Svoboda and Danny Powell.
The lead was short lived as St. Lawrence answered with a power-play tally three minutes later by Russ Bartlett, with Mike Gellard and Erik Anderson garnering assists.
Blair Clarance and Ryan Glenn would light the lamp for the Saints before the end of the first period, leaving the score at 4-2 in favor of the visitors.
“We got behind the eightball right off the bat, going down 4-2,” head coach Mike Schafer ’86 said.
After stopping just 12-of-16 shots in the first, Burt was pulled in favor of junior Matt Underhill.
“Ian didn’t get a whole lot of help. We gave up 16 shots in the first period — we didn’t give up 16 shots in our last three games,” Schafer said.
But even Underhill could not stem the tide, as the squad from the North country scored two more goals to take a 6-2 lead into the final frame.
The first of these goals came off a face off, where Alan Fyfe one-timed the puck past a shocked Underhill at 8:42 of the period. Ray DiLauro pushed the Saints’ lead to four goal just over a minute later, when his shot from the point found its way into the net.
Cornell was unable to mount any attack in the third period, as the team spent most of it on the penalty kill. Five penalties in the period showed the frustration at the scoreboard, and a non-call on a hit-from-behind to sophomore Shane Palahicky, halted the Red from cutting into the lead.
Palahicky did not return to the game and is out with what Schafer described as a “major injury.”
However, perhaps the lone bright spot for the Red was the play of freshman Kelly Hughes, who asserted himself along the boards as well as notching his first collegiate goal with just over four minutes to play in the game, giving the final margin, 6-3.
“It is unfortunate that it didn’t come in a better game, but it was great. I just stayed wide and Mark (McRae) put a pass on my stick, and I just shot as hard as I could. I didn’t even look at the goalie, and it found its way in,” Hughes said.
Another difficulty for the Red may have been the absence of sophomore defenseman Doug Murray, as he was suspended for fighting at the end of the game against Clarkson.
“It was tough to lose Doug Murray the way we did last night, and it put a real stretch on our guys,” Schafer said.
But in the end, it was the superior play of the Saints across the board, and the mental miscues of the Red which decided the game.
“It was just the little things. We gave up a face-off goal tonight and didn’t tie up around the net on a power play,” Schafer said. “Those are all things that we had talked about and we are pretty good at. But we didn’t get that aspect of it done tonight.”
Underhill was discouraged by the inability of his team to put back-to-back wins together.
“We have done it twice in a row — put ourselves in a position to go into first place on Friday, and come out Saturday kind of flat. There is no excuse for that,” he said.
Archived article by J.V. Anderton