Gordon Anderson
Special to the Times
PETERBOROUGH— Needing a two-goal victory to punch their ticket to the quarter-finals, the Muskies only could muster a 1-1 tie against the Kincardine Knights this morning in the final game of Pool ‘E’ action at the OFSAA ‘A/AA’ hockey championships.
Fort High, ranked seventh, finished with a 1-1-2 record—winding up one point behind the top-ranked Glendale Gemini (Tillsonburg) for second place.
Kincardine, ranked 13th, finished in first place.
Only the top two teams from each pool advance to the quarter-finals.
Braden Webb netted the Muskies’ lone goal in the dying seconds of the first period.
Passionate play and effort were the common denominators, but the offensive chances were left wanting.
They simply couldn’t get the goals they desperately needed.
“We had a lot of chances today,” lamented Muskie head coach Shawn Jourdain, echoing the common refrain he’s said after every game.
“We probably out-chanced them four to one but, again, we just couldn’t put the puck in the back of the net.”
“We worked hard and I told the kids I was proud of them,” he added.
“They didn’t quit and that’s the bottom line.”
Jourdain also thought this morning’s game might have been a moot point because they shouldn’t have been in such a precarious position of needing a win in the first place.
“We started out slow,” Jourdain said of their first two games. “We [seem to] have that problem, but we came on strong the last two games.
“If we would have played like [today and last night] in the first two games, I think we’d be playing tonight [in the quarter-finals].”
Fort High took the first minor of the game when Josh Gouin went off for kneeing. But the Muskies had the best scoring chance when Chris Bobczynski stole the puck behind the Kincardine net and saw his wraparound attempt rattle off the left post.
Less than a minute after getting out of the box, Gouin found himself all alone in the slot but his errant shot bounced off the glass.
Fort High kept pressing, though, and finally took a well-deserved 1-0 lead with 17.3 seconds left in the first when Webb intercepted a wayward clearing pass in the slot and beat Kincardine goalie Easton Battler with a wrist shot to the blocker side.
As the second period progressed and the desperation for another goal increased, the Muskie defence started pinching in at the point.
But Scott Parsons made a number of key saves, including a 2-on-1 blocker save with less than five minutes left in the second.
Then with less than 17 seconds left in the middle period, Ryan Windigo intercepted a pass in the Kincardine slot and was all alone, but missed the net with a wrist shot over the crossbar.
As it turned out, that would prove crucial.
Kincardine knotted the game—and dashed the Muskies’ goal of a quarter-final berth—less than 30 seconds into the third when Matthew Baker beat Parsons to the glove side with a shot from the point.
Fort High pulled their goalie with more than a minute to go, but again were left grasping at shadows in the goal-scoring department.
Desperate rally
The Muskies had kept their playoff hopes alive by rallying for a 2-2 tie against Glendale on Thursday night.
The black-and-gold oozed desperation—evident in the shot-blocking, the physical play, and the bodies diving all over the ice—as the squad erased a 2-0 deficit.
“That is the way how we usually play hockey,” Jourdain said of the pure desperation shown by his club.
“The first couple of games we have come out flat,” admitted Muskie forward Nick Kaun.
“We are finally hitting our stride and I am happy with the way the guys played [tonight].
“Hopefully, we can build on that and keep going.”
Commitment on both sides was high in the early stages of the first period, but neither team looked like a goal was on the radar.
Besides the random half-chance for either team, nothing too serious was in the offing.
Fort High was the first to succumb.
Ryan Brackler beat Parsons high to the glove on a wrist shot from the mid-slot at 8:44 of the first.
Then just over a minute later, Jordan Kobayashi doubled the lead when got loose off an offensive face-off and beat Parsons over the left shoulder with a diving chip shot.
Fort High radiated the aura of a team needing and looking for a break—and they found it when Glendale took a minor penalty 43 seconds after the second goal.
If the black-and-gold ever needed a power-play goal to salvage a season, they got it. Nick Jourdain beat Gemini goalie Patrick Tanner with a slapshot through traffic from the left point to cut the lead to 2-1.
Then an old familiar foe showed up to the party uninvited.
The Muskies took four-consecutive minor penalties in the second, including a double minor to Jeff Davis for smacking a Gemini player face-first into boards in front on the Fort High bench.
But solid goaltending from Parsons, and desperate penalty-killing units, managed to kill off the minors to keep the score at the slimmest of margins through two periods.
After just 30 minutes of play, the Muskies had amassed an astounding 14 minutes in penalties.
Kaun admitted that sometimes it’s hard to toe the line with the referees, but they have to learn how to harness their own energy.
“In the first two periods, we took some stupid penalties,” he admitted.
“But we have to fight through the emotion while doing the best we can to stay on the edge.”
Jourdain said the teams’ penalty killing is good because they get a lot of practice at it during games.
“Yeah, we do it a lot,” he conceded. “But we killed them off and got back in it in the third period.”
The Muskies completed the comeback just 4:10 into the third when Braden Webb’s backhand, through traffic, found the top half of the net.
After scoring the goal, Webb dropped to one knee and pumped his right arm in celebration.
“The game gave us something to build on,” Kaun said.
“As long as we stay out of the [penalty] box, we will be able to do it [win this morning’s game].”
Unfortunately, it was not to be.
