Green makes good on second chance

The resigned look on the face of Jason Green—after his team had lost 1-0 to the St. Michael’s Double Blues on Friday afternoon—said it all.
Placing his back to the wall in the dressing room hallway of the Tecumseh Arena in Windsor, where he had just played his last game in a Muskie uniform, Green crossed his arms and confessed the emotions that were festering inside his 19-year-old mind after the Muskies’ quarter-final defeat.
“I could’ve made the 43rd save instead of just 42 saves,” he said, shaking his head.
It was because of Green’s efforts that the Muskies were able to advance out of their pool at the all-Ontarios in Windsor and into the quarter-finals.
Still, he was disappointed he couldn’t help his team get into the medal round on Saturday.
“There’s nothing to be ashamed of because that team [St. Michael’s] is one of the best teams in this tournament and we didn’t back down from whistle to whistle,” Green remarked.
Playing in a zone that could only be found by the “Enterprise,” Green stretched his abilities and calmed his emotions to help lead the Muskies to a 2-1-1 record in pool play—proving they were a team not to be taken lightly despite their 17th ranking going into the tournament.
“People aren’t expecting us to do well with a 17th seeding, but rankings mean nothing,” Green had said after backstopping the black-and-gold to a 6-3 win over the eighth-seeded St. Thomas More Knights (Hamilton) to open play last Wednesday morning.
A 3-1 win over the 16th-ranked Chatham-Kent Golden Hawks followed Thursday morning in a game where Green “stole the show,” as Muskie head coach Shane Bliss described.
Making saves that could have been used by TSN for its nightly highlights segment, Green gave his team a 2-0 record. And he not only handled the pressure a goalie faces in a big games, but he was craving it—along with two other third-year players.”
“The three of us in me, [David] Pierce, and [Jacob] Esselink, this is our third year and we’re pretty much taking the leadership on our shoulders,” Green said.
Actually, this was not technically his third year because Green did not start the season with the Muskies.
But after Cody Wood left the team, he was given a call from Bliss to join the team in the middle of the season. And that call seemed to have been one of the smartest choices Bliss has made in his young coaching career.
“Jason is a big part of our success right now—he’s on a mission,” Bliss had said after their win over the Golden Hawks.
Green was a goalie with the Muskies at the all-Ontarios in London last year, where the team finished with a 1-2-1 record and failed to advance out of their pool.
“He didn’t have the performance he wanted to have and struggled a bit, and he’s happy to have a second chance at it this year,” Bliss said of Green.
“His goal is to not have a loss for his last game in his high school hockey career, and he’s doing a job right now, that’s for sure,” Bliss added.
“I was reading a book and it said that you can have a pretty crappy team with a pretty good goalie and still make it pretty far,” noted Muskie Tyler Miller.
Miller wasn’t suggesting the Muskies were “a crappy team, but he was trying to stress what Green really meant to the team and their hopes for a gold medal.
It was against the top-seeded St. Mary Monarchs (in a game played only a few hours after the Golden Hawks’ one) where Green accepted a challenge presented by Bliss.
Before the game began, Bliss handed Green an article from the Toronto Star, which stated Monarchs’ goalie Matt Thompson was the newspaper’s pick as the top high school goalie in Ontario.
“And I was like, ‘No, that’s not right,’” said Green. “So I just went out there and got in the zone, and it felt like the championship for me out there.”
It was another smart coaching tactic by Bliss as the game ended in a 1-1 tie, which gave the Muskies an excellent chance to advance to the quarter-finals.
“We were pretty mad about that 17th ranking, and we wanted to show that it’s wrong and that we should be the number-one team down here,” said Green.
“We like the underdog role, though, because every team is
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