NORTH ANDOVER, Mass. — Merrimack and Boston College battled it out in a highly-contested Hockey East matchup Friday night as both teams were trying to get back in the win column after losing to fellow conference rivals.
The result was a 4-2 win for the Eagles.
“The type of game it was tonight helped us emotionally,” said BC coach Jerry York. “We were coming off a really hard loss that can affect you if you let it. It was a hard-fought, physical game and all of a sudden, we were right back in the game.”
The game’s opening period was dominated early by Merrimack when the Warriors outshot BC 4-1 within the frame’s first five minutes. Within Merrimack’s early chances came two near-goal opportunities that would have produced an early lead.
Jace Hennig had a chance when he walked in on the left-wing boards a fired a shot that went up and over the shoulder of Thatcher Demko.
The Eagles got the scoring started when Alex Tuch tipped a shot from the point past Rasmus Tirronen to give BC the 1-0 advantage midway through the period.
Tuch wasn’t done scoring yet when he placed himself in front of Tirronen and got another stick on a point shot from Steve Santini to put his team up by a pair of goals to end the period.
Both goaltenders made unbelievable point-blank stops to start the second period. BC extended its lead early on when Austin Cangelosi took a feed from Teddy Doherty and put it behind Tirronen for the 3-0 lead.
After a timeout, Merrimack was able to get things going when Dan Kolomatis fed a cross-ice pass to Ben Bahe and he fired it home to cut the lead to 3-1.
Things got chippy with 5:46 to go in the period when Ryan Fitzgerald and Clayton Jardine were tied up along the Eagles’ bench and then each player on the ice got into it and 105 penalty minutes were called.
Brett Seney cut it to 3-2 when he jammed the puck past Demko on a late power-play opportunity.
The third period was a back-and-forth period that saw Merrimack get their chances to to tie or even win the game, but a strong Eagles’ defense saw Demko make five big stops and Adam Gilmour notched a late empty-netter.
Demko made 30 saves, while Tirronen made 15.
“So much for analytics,” said Merrimack coach Mark Dennehy. “I thought we got outworked. It wasn’t about execution [and] it wasn’t about effort. We didn’t battle hard enough. We didn’t empty the tank and play as hard as we needed to.”
