Hawks fall with 0:07 left; East, Marshall recover
By John Gilbert
SAINT PAUL, MN.
Coming close doesn’t ever get satisfying for coach Bruce Plante. Nor does being the “public school” hockey champion. But Saturday afternoon’s stinging 5-4 loss to St. Thomas Academy in the Class A Minnesota state tournament championship game might have been the hardest to swallow for the veteran coach.
He’s had practice, too. This was the fourth straight time Hermantown (25-5-1) reached the A title game, and the fourth straight time the Hawks have come away unfulfilled — and the third time St. Thomas Academy had been the team to beat the Hawks in the final. It gave the Cadets (27-2-2) their third straight Class A championship to send them on their way into Class AA next season.
Matt Perry, a senior who insists he’s a shut-down checking center assigned to opposing top-line centers, scored the first hat trick of his life with a goal in each period — including the first goal of the third period to ignite a three-goal rally that overturned a 4-2 Hermantown lead. Henry Hart followed with the tying goal, and Tommy Novak blasted a 30-foot power-play slapshot with seven seconds remaining, to give the Cadets their victory.
When the game ended, Plante stalked across the ice to confront referee J.B. Olson, who had called a marginal holding penalty on Scott Wasbotten with 1:57 remaining and the teams locked in an intensely exciting 4-4 battle. Technically, the play could have met the strictest requirement of holding, and there are those who say every technical violation should be called. However, the worst was yet to come.
"If you're going to call that one," Hermantown coach Bruce Plante told referee J.B. Olson...
..."then you've got to call that one, too."
The Hawks were scrambling to efficiently kill off the penalty and get to overtime, but on the game-ending power play, a St. Thomas Academy skater trying to prevent Hawk defenseman Jake Zeleznikar from clearing the puck, accosted Zeleznikar in a far more flagrant violation that was not called, allowing the Cadets to regain possession in the closing seconds, and leading directly to Novak’s winning goal.
“I went after a loose puck on the half-wall,” Zeleznikar said. “But their guy had me in a headlock, and when I tried to chip it out of the zone, I couldn’t move.”
In the post-game interview setting, Plante said: “We got a penalty on one play, then they wrapped our guy up and got the winning goal when they didn’t call it.” Asked about the “discussion” he had with the ref, Plante said, evenly: “It was one-way. It wasn’t a discussion; it was one-way. I thought it was a great game, and I loved our effort…I don’t know if we can play any better. But to have a call like that, and a non-call, at the end of a game makes this one of the most disappointing losses I’ve ever had.”
That includes last year, when Plante acknowledges his team didn’t play very well in a 5-1 loss to St. Thomas Academy. The year before more closely duplicated this one, when a couple of controversial calls contributed to Hermantown losing a lead late in the game, and St. Thomas Academy won 5-4 in overtime.
Chris Benson scored on his own rebound to ignite a 3-goal Hermantown rally.
“Last year, we didn’t play our best,” Plante recalled. “But this time we played smart, physical — everything you have to do to win the game. Of course St. Thomas Academy brings out the best in us. So does St. Cloud Cathedral, Marshall, and Breck. These guys know you have to play your best to beat them.”
It was unfortunate that a tournament with such emotionally inspiring play would be dotted by some strange officiating, but worse, that a state championship would be influenced so heavily by such a close-order exchange of curious calls. Particularly because it was such an impressive game, with both teams exchanging offensive haymakers.
St. Thomas Academy came into the game on a streak that showed why the time has come to move the Inver Grove Heights private school up to AA. The Cadets had run up an eight-game winning streak coming into the title game, and while outscoring those eight opponents 76-2, the Cadets shut out Henry Sibley, Chisago Lakes and Totino Grace in Section 4, then blanked St. Cloud Apollo (12-0) and East Grand Forks (11-0) in the state tournament.
But Saturday, the Cadets faced the first team since January that could challenge them. They ran their consecutive goal-scoring streak to 24 in the state tournament and 43 straight goals since playoffs began when Perry scored at 15:12 of the first period. But at 15:54, just six seconds before the first period ended, Hermantown snapped those streaks when Chris Benson tried a wraparound that goalie David Zevnik blocked, but Benson scored on his own rebound foir a 1-1 tie.
Hawks celebrated Scott Wasbotten's goal for a 2-1 lead in the Class A final against St. Thomas Academy.
Aroused, the Hawks rushed out in the second period and took the action to the Cadets, jumping to a 3-1 lead with a pair of goals 18 seconds apart. Scott Wasbotten scored on a rebound at 9:38, and Neal Pionk rushed in from the left point and passed across the crease where Ryan Kero had and easy goal at 10:46. Perry’s secod goal of the game came on a power play at 15:07 to cut it to 3-2, but 37 seconds later Lane LeGarde scored with a shot that popped up off Zevnik and trickled across the line just as Hermantown’s Grant Sega crashed into the goaltender.
With a 4-2 lead, the Hawks looked pretty secure, but the highly skilled Cadets were far from done. Gunnar Regan fired a shot that Adam Smith stopped, but the rebound went right to Perry, and he put it away at 2:53 to make it 4-3. “We all knew we could come back,” Perry said. “And after we got that first goal in the third period, I felt we could do it.”
The Cadets tied it 4-4 at 9:05 when Henry Hart got a blocked puck in the slot, whirled and fired a shot off the right pipe and in. That sent the game on toward what looked like overtime, but then came the intrusion of the questionable penalties, leading to the Cadets fantastic finish and obscuring what a great game it was.
“I’m just proud of our guys,” said St. Thomas Academy co-coach Greg Vannelli. “We’ve had a target on our backs all year.” Asked how Hermantown was able to score and challenge a Cadets team that many thought was invincible, Vannelli said: “They’re just a good team. They probably did what they’ve done all year.”
St. Thomas goaltender David Zevnik survived Nate Pionk's rush to the goal.
The Hawks had a much tougher bracket than St. Thomas Academy, as the tournament made it appear that the Cadets, the Hawks, and Breck were clearly the best three teams of the field of eight. Hermantown had to beat Marshall 3-0 in a neighborhood quarterfinal battle, then get past Breck 4-3 in two overtimes, while St. Thomas Academy was breezing to its 12-0 and 11-0 romps.
Marshall came back from that opening loss to beat Marshall, Minnesota, 4-1, and Saturday morning the Hilltoppers jumped to a 4-2 first-period lead and beat Rochester Lourdes 6-5. Connor Flaherty and Matthew Klassen scored twice each for Marshall, while Lourdes made it close with two goals in the last 1:12. Marshall gained a large measure of satisfaction from beating Lourdes, which had inflicted a 7-0 beating on the ‘Toppers in mid-January.
Disappointing as Hermantown’s fourth straight championship game loss was, the three Duluth schools at the state tournament went a combined 6-2, with the Hawks winning the runner-up trophy, Marshall winning the consolation trophy, and the East Greyhounds bringing home the third-place trophy in Class AA.
The Greyhounds, beaten 3-2 by Edina in the semifinals of AA to snap a 17-game winning streak, bounced back to beat Wayzata 7-3 in the AA third-place game. The ‘Hounds jumped to a 4-0 lead and cruised to victory behind a pair of goals by both Philip Beaulieu and Alex Toscano, while Jack Forbort, Alex Trapp and Nick Altmann also scored.
That victory gave East a final record of 25-5, while Wayzata finished 22-8, and it also provided extra satisfaction for the Greyhounds, who lost 1-0 to Wayzata in the third game of the season.
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About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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