Merrimack and Maine battled it out in a highly contested Hockey East matchup. Merrimack was seeking revenge after dropping Friday’s game to Maine by a 4-3 score. This was another tightly knit game that ended in a 5-3 Maine win.<\/p>\n
“Our kids worked their tails off both days and got four points,” said Maine coach Dennis Gendron.<\/p>\n
The first period was a battle of the goaltenders, as well as special teams. Each team made the stops they had to to hold the other scoreless after one period of play.<\/p>\n
Merrimack killed off one penalty while Maine killed off a pair of its own. The first period ended in a scoreless tie.<\/p>\n
The second period saw the score sheet fill up with six goals between the two teams.<\/p>\n
Merrimack broke the tie when Hampus Gustafsson fired a puck past Matt Morris to give Merrimack a 1-0 lead just 16 seconds into the period. Just 45 seconds later, Jace Hennig jammed a puck in from the top of the crease to extend Merrimack’s lead to 2-0.<\/p>\n
Maine quickly answered when Steven Swavely redirected a puck past Rasmus Tirronen to cut the lead in half at 2-1.<\/p>\n
With just over 10 minutes left in the period, Maine’s Cedric Lacroix scored the lone power-play goal of the game and tied it at two.<\/p>\n
Brian Morgan continued the scoring when he tucked a puck in the near side of Tirronen to put Maine up 3-2. Four minutes later, Maine doubled its lead when freshman Nolan Vesey scored to put the Black Bears up 4-2 heading into the final period of the game.<\/p>\n
The third period saw Merrimack push back, but a late Maine goal put the game away.<\/p>\n
Gustafsson made things interesting when he scored his second goal of the evening and put Merrimack within one goal at 4-3.<\/p>\n
Maine’s solid defense kept Merrimack from finding the back of the cage for the rest of the game, and a Blaine Byron empty-netter with eight seconds to go gave Maine the 5-3 win and the sweep of the weekend series.<\/p>\n
“I thought we played well for large stretches of the game; at the end of the day, it’s about winning and losing,” said Merrimack coach Mark Dennehy. “At the end of the day, it’s about winning.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Merrimack and Maine battled it out in a highly contested Hockey East matchup. Merrimack was seeking revenge after dropping Friday’s game to Maine by a 4-3 score. This was another tightly knit game that ended in a 5-3 Maine win. “Our kids worked their tails off both days and got four points,” said Maine coach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":22374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20393"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20394,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20393\/revisions\/20394"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20393"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uscho.com\/recaps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}