MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota is starting its 21st season as a Division I program, and over those two decades plus, only one team has a winning record versus the Gophers.
Merrimack holds that distinction after taking the first-ever meeting of the teams in come-from-behind fashion, 4-3, in front of 1,171 fans on Friday.
“I thought it was a great team effort,” Warriors coach Erin Hamlen said. “From start to finish, I thought our team was resilient and they held their own.”
Merrimack (2-0) yielded three times as many shots as it fired on goal, but sophomore goaltender Lea-Kristine Demers had the answer for 54 of them.
“We certainly had to weather a storm,” Hamlen said.
It wasn’t a Category 5 storm, as No. 3 Minnesota (0-1) lacks the thunder it has possessed in recent years. Only senior captains Cara Piazza and Sydney Baldwin have reached the 50-point mark for their careers, with Baldwin doing so via an assist on Olivia Knowles’ goal that made it 3-1 Gophers with 30 seconds left in the opening frame.
Had the hosts been able to carry that lead into the locker room, perhaps the outcome would have been different.
“We talked as we were sending our five over the bench, ‘We cannot give one up,’ and it’s in our net,” Minnesota coach Brad Frost said.
Junior Katelyn Rae put it there 13 seconds before intermission, her second marker of the season. Riding that momentum, newcomer Maddy Burton knotted the score minutes into the middle stanza.
“In the last two games, we’ve had two freshmen score for us,” Hamlen said. “That’s a good sign, when you’ve got your freshmen putting points up.”
The Gophers had a similar sign, as Knowles chipped in an assist on classmate Grace Zumwinkle’s power-play blast after sophomore Kippen Keller opened the scoring and Mikyla Grant-Mentis answered for Merrimack.
“In the end, I think what it came down to is we just sacrificed,” Hamlen said.
The one thing the Warriors refused to sacrifice was the lead, as Jessica Bonfe’s winning goal with five minutes gone in the second period was the final tally of the contest.
“They defended really well, blocked a lot of shots, and kept things to the outside,” Frost said. “Their goalie played very well.”
In her Minnesota career, goalie Sidney Peters has had starts where she played very well, and others where she played not very well. In the opener, it was the latter, as she yielded goals on four of a dozen shots, lasting only 25 minutes.
The Gophers will need a better performance from either Peters or freshman Alex Gulstene, who stopped all seven shots in relief, if they hope to salvage something from their opening series, which concludes Sunday at 2:07 p.m. CDT.
