Photo from @UNDMhockey
GRAND FORKS, ND– Despite a shaky 22-seconds in the third, the University of North Dakota was able to salvage a tie against Union College in the second game of the 2017 Subway Holiday Classic with a final of 2-2.
UND tried to get a little boost from former UND player Zach Parise, who visited the area as he recovers from back surgery for the ceremonial face-off. After the regular face-off, UND got off to a quick start, which was quite the difference from the Friday night’s game. The Hawks struck first, as defenseman Colton Poolman came on for a line-change and received a feed from Ludvig Hoff, danced around a Union defender and roofed it over Jake Kupsky’s glove to make it 1-0. Union tried to get the equalizer, but Peter Thome stopped all of the Dutchmen’s nine shots in the period to keep it 1-0 UND after 20.
“Lot better than last night’s game,” UND head coach Brad Berry stated post-game. “We had emotion, we had energy, we started the game the right way. That’s a great team over there– they were hard and heavy and didn’t give a lot of space.”
“We came out like we should have Friday night,” said Poolman. “Give them credit, they came back with another hard heavy game. That’s that way we got to play.”
Not much to write home about in the second period. Both UND and Union traded power plays that yielded nothing, though the line of Cole Smith, Johnny Simonson, and defense-turned-forward Josh Rieger gave a bit of a boost with some solid forechecking creating some chances for the Fighting Hawks.
Union got off to a quick start less with two goals 22 seconds apart to open the third frame. First, Brett Supinski crossed-up Peter Thome off a feed from Sebastian Vidmar. Then, Cole Maier got his shot blocked twice with the third trickling through to the stick of Ryan Scarfo to make it 2-1 Union less than three minutes into the third. While Union kept getting chances, Thome was equal to the task. After a Cole Smith penalty, UND had a three-on-two rush started by Poolman with pass across to Rhett Gardner who put a shot on Kupsky, who let up a big rebound right to Shane Gersich’s stick to tie it for UND with 3:18 left in the third. The final 3:18 solved nothing, which pushed it to overtime.
Decent chances for UND and Union in overtime with the most interesting being Anthony Rinaldi getting a bit of a breakaway, then checked down by Gabe Bast, running into Thome– which led to Thome losing his skate blade on the post when colliding with it. The game ended in a 2-2 tie, putting UND at 8-4-4 on the season.
“Obviously, you want to win for a lot of different reasons– Pairwise and all of that,” said Berry, “But I think we learned a lot. We don’t hang our hat on who’s in the line-up and who’s out of the line-up or hang an excuse on that. We did a job tonight. We will move forward and learn from it.”
“Yesterday was a bad start and signaled the whole game,” mentioned Gersich. “Tonight, Colton (Poolman) scored right away to set the tone for us. We’ve got to come out mentally ready at the start of every game and that sets out the rest of the game for us.”
UND will close out the first half of their home schedule next weekend against Western Michigan at the Ralph Engelstad Arena before going on the road to St. Cloud to end the first half.
Scotty Wazz 