MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — When Robert Morris and Canisius played in the 2014 Atlantic Hockey championship game last March, both teams kept the fans on the edges of their seats with a frantic exchange of goals.
In their rematch Friday night at 84 Lumber Arena, the scoring was at a premium, but the excitement level was almost as high.
In a hard-fought game with a true playoff atmosphere, the Colonials won their seventh consecutive game while pushing their lead in the standings to ten points over the second-place Griffins with a 2-1 overtime win.
After 60 minutes, the teams headed to overtime with the Griffins carrying a 27-25 shot advantage into the five-minute bonus period. Each team got one golden opportunity and the Colonials took full advantage of theirs.
With just over a minute left in the overtime, a Colonial turnover ended up on the stick of Canisius’ Shane Conacher, who skated in all alone over the blue line and fired a hard shot that looked as if it was the game-winner. However, it clanked of the post to the left of Dalton Izyk and before fans could catch their breath, Greg Gibson ended the game with his goal between the circles that beat Keegan Admundson clean for his eighth goal of the season.
“There wasn’t a lot of pace in the first or second, but it picked up in the third,” Gibson said. “[Canisius is] a good team and they have a good defensive structure, but we kept chipping away and came out on top. We’ll come out with the same mindset tomorrow night and hopefully, get another win.”
“That wasn’t textbook tonight, but we found a way to get the job done,” Robert Morris coach Derek Schooley said. “There wasn’t really a lot going on in this game tonight. It was like both teams were figuring out how each other were going to play. We made one more play tonight, they hit a post, and we made a play. We really need to get after it tomorrow night because Canisius is a good hockey team, they didn’t give us many chances.”
From the drop of the puck, both teams had to make the best use of what little time and space they could make as blocked shots, and attention to defense kept the scoring chances to a minimum. Canisius held 9-6 shot advantage after 20 minutes of play and managed a few odd-man rushes that resulted in either a save by Izyk, or a shot that was off-target.
The Colonials opened the scoring with a power-play goal at 3:55 of the second frame when Tyson Wilson scored his third goal in as many games. Wilson beat Asmundson with a wrister from the lower right circle to give his team the lead with assists from Cody Wydo and Zac Lynch.
Canisius answered early in the third period as Ralph Cuddemi notched his team-high 17th goal when he poked a loose puck past Izyk to tie the score at one.
The remainder of the third saw both teams open up the ice as the stoppages became less and the flow returned. But the tempo still produced little more in the way of scoring chances and when they did occur, Izyk and Asmundson were equal to the challenge.
With the win, the Colonials reached the 20-win plateu for the second time in program history.
“I thought we played very hard tonight against a high-powered offense,” Canisius coach Dave Smith said. “I thought we controlled a lot of the play, but in the end, they had a chance to win and we had a chance to win and they got theirs and we didn’t. It really felt like a playoff game coming into the weekend and I think it played out like a playoff game and the margin of victory was slim. We were just on the wrong side of it. We’re a hard team to play against and there’s a lot of positives to build off of tonight.”
