Dan Falloon
While the Muskie boys’ hockey players who were on the ice at the all-Ontarios in St. Catharines made their presence known, it arguably was the one on the sidelines who had one of the biggest impacts on Fort High’s fate.
Captain Jamie Kaun, the team’s scoring leader, was lost to a sprained ankle in the Muskies’ opening 6-1 loss last Tuesday to eventual champion Denis Morris of St. Catharines.
“Anytime you lose Jamie, it’s a big hit because he plays in every situation,” said Muskie head coach Shawn Jourdain.
The black-and-gold rallied to a 2-0-1 record in their remaining games in Pool ‘B’ to finish preliminary play tied for second place with St. Mary’s (Woodstock). But the Warriors earned the second playoff berth based on their better goal differential, which stood at +4 to Fort High’s +1.
(Differences only were counted up to five goals, so the Muskies’ 9-2 win over the Widdifield Wildcats of North Bay in their final pool game last Thursday morning, for example, didn’t count for the full seven).
Kaun’s absence may have been most noticeable in Fort High’s 4-4 draw with St. Mary’s last Wednesday morning as the Warriors struck for three power-play goals.
If Fort High, ranked 11th, had downed the No. 8 Warriors, the tiebreaker goes out the window and the Muskies advance to the playoff round for the first time since winning it all in 2001.
“I think the kids played well without him [Kaun],” lauded Jourdain.
“Dave Chambers went back and did a great job to help out the ‘D’. He did a very good job getting it out of the zone,” he noted.
“Up front, Donovan Cousineau and most of the kids played really well the whole time,” Jourdain added.
Ultimately, Fort High didn’t have another Kaun-type to plug the gap, said Cousineau.
“He’s been our leader all year, and probably our best defenceman all year,” the Grade 10 forward said of Kaun. “Big body, good shot, he can skate.
“We lost a solid player when we lost him.
“His shot was a big deal on our power play, we couldn’t find another one like it,” Cousineau added.
Chris Cousineau contributed three goals from the back end while Nathan Calder and Chambers also found scored from the blueline.
Assistant captain Brendan Cawston also missed Kaun on special teams, although it was the penalty kill where he most noticed that the hulking defenceman wasn’t there.
“He’s normally really good at getting the puck down, and we seemed a lot weaker in front of the net,” he noted.
“He normally can get it and just skate it out.”
Despite being sidelined, Kaun felt he still had a leadership role to play from the stands, encouraging his teammates and analyzing the opponent.
“I thought that I had to keep positive, say positive things,” he recalled. “I also watched from the crowd.
“If I see something that they could do better, or tell the other team’s weaknesses that we could use against them.”
The key game for “what ifs” all points back to the St. Mary’s showdown as second-ranked Denis Morris ended up being the toast of the tournament while the Muskies were able to subdue the No. 14 Mayfield Mavericks 3-2 last Wednesday night before toying with the No. 19 Wildcats.
Jourdain looked back to special teams as the area that kept the Muskies from gaining any momentum.
“We’d score a goal, we’d take a penalty, and they’d keep coming back that way,” he recalled.
St. Mary’s finished three-for-four with the man advantage, but it was one of the missed calls that had the Muskies fuming as Kyle Robertson buried a short-handed marker to tie the game at 3-3 just a minute before the Warriors grabbed a 4-3 lead.
“Dave [Chambers] came out from behind the net, got tripped, the referee didn’t make the call and they ended up getting a breakaway out of it,” sighed Jourdain.
“That really changed the game right there.”
Meanwhile, Cousineau, who notched six points, including three goals, in the rout of Widdifield, felt a victory over St. Mary’s was well within reach.
“We thought we dominated them the entire game, it was just penalties,” he bemoaned. “Without that, I think we would have beat them easily.
“I thought it was very disappointing,” Cousineau added. “I think we could have gone far if we could have made it through [to the playoff round].”
While the pre-tournament rankings played a role in how the teams were grouped together, Cawston didn’t put any stock in how the rest of OFSAA played out, explaining he felt the rankings were just arbitrary and the Warriors’ higher seeding was no excuse for not beating them.
“The [rankings] really mean nothing. It’s just all how the league plays out, and the past years,” Cawston remarked.
“We should have won the game,” he stressed. “We were the better team and we had more skill than them.
“We just ran into penalties and they capitalized on them,” he concluded.
Kaun saw that his teammates didn’t get settled until it was too late, taking a quarter-final berth with it.
“We were nervous for the first couple games there, and that’s what lost us out of our pool,” he said. “It was back and forth a bit, but we started to get running around a bit.
“We were a little bit nervous and excited to be there, still.”
Cawston paced the black-and-gold in the early games of the tournament, connecting for two goals and five points in the first three to keep the Muskies afloat.
“I wanted to help the team win, I wanted to battle,” he said. “Everybody was, every line was going.
“I had a lot of help from the team to get pucks and put pucks to the net,” he added.
