Hawks go public, reaching Class A final
By John Gilbert
SAINT PAUL, MN. — “We’re the public school champ,” declared Hermantown coach Bruce Plante, after his Hawks defeated Thief River Falls 3-2 Friday in the Class A state hockey tournament semifinals. “I told the Thief guys that before the game — that we were playing for the public school title.”
That means the Hawks are half done, because they now face a Saturday championship game against St. Thomas Academy that is a rematch of last year’s final, won 5-4 in overtime by St. Thomas Academy. Defending state champ St. Thomas Academy reached the final by beating Breck 1-0 in the “private school” championship half of the bracket.
Conrad Sampair scored both Hill-Murray goals to beat Moorhead 2-1 in OT.
Meanwhile, it’s an all-private-school Class AA final Saturday night. Hill-Murray defeated Moorhead 2-1 in overtime, when Conrad Sampair tied the game 1-1 by solving previously invincible Spuds goaltender Michael Blitzer for a goal at 9:58 of the third period, in which the Pioneers outshot Moorhead 12-1. Sampair then sped around the defense and won it with a goal at 1:51 of sudden-death. The Pioneers (24-6) are peaking at exactly the right time, but their foe in the Saturday night AA final will be a Benilde-St. Margaret’s team that turned from upset specialist to dynamo Friday night, crushing Lakeville South 10-1.
Dan Labosky (27) completed his hat trick as Benilde crushed Lakeville South 10-1.
Dan Labosky had a hat trick and Grant Besse and Zack Hale two each for Benilde (24-6), as the Red Knights led 5-0 after one and 7-0 after two. Lakeville South was outshot 38-21 and showed none of the masterful and focused technique that upset No. 1 Duluth East 3-2 in the first round.
As for East, the Greyhounds joined the three other AA top seeds at Mariucci Arena and bounced back in the third period to beat Edina 3-2. Trailing 1-0, Dom Toninato scored at 2:37 of the third to tie the game, but Edina quickly regained the lead, only to have the Hounds tie it again on Jake Randolph’s power-play goal. Toninato scored again, at 14:36, during a scramble at the Edina goal, and East advances to Saturday’s consolation final with a 29-2 record, to face an Eagan team that whipped Maple Grove 4-1 Friday.
Hermantown goalie Matt Mensinger's final save with 0:00 left ended the 3-2 semifina victory over Thief River Falls.
Friday’s Class A semifinals were more dramatic than the AA games. Hermantown’s victory in the second Class A semifinal went right to the final buzzer, and then some, as Hawks goaltender Matt Mensinger blocked one shot with two seconds left, and sprawled on his back to stop another Thief River Falls try as the clock hit 0:00. That put him in an oddly vulnerable position as his teammates, swarming to celebrate their 3-2 victory, piled on top of the goalie before he had a chance to get to his feet. “That’s the first one of those I’ve ever been in like that,” said Mensinger. “It hurt being on the bottom. I couldn’t even see.”
But he saw things well enough to give the No. 1 ranked Hawks two things they’ve waited for: the chance to face No.2 St. Thomas Academy in Saturday’s High Noon showdown for the Class A title, and the chance for coach Plante to try to convince everybody the Hawks are the underdog.
The Hawks buried Mensinger celebrating the victory.
When a 1-0 lead suddenly turned into a 2-1 deficit in the third period, the Hawks responded the way they have all season. Jared Kolquist’s goal tied it 2-2, and Jared Thomas’s second goal of the game, with 5:15 remaining, reclaimed the lead for the Hawks at 3-2.
“We wanted to make sure we won two to get another shot at ’em,” said Thomas, who scored the first and last goals of the game to get the Hawks started and to win the game. Thomas, wide to the left of the net, rapped in the rebound of a Jared Kolquist shot at 6:34 of the first period, and it appeared Hermantown would be content to win 1-0 as the game headed into the third period.
Thief River Falls tied the Hawks 1-1 on Austin Odberg's goal.
It took two goals by the Prowlers to slap the Hawks upside the head. Austin Odberg broke up the right side for a pass from Riley Soderstrom, and when goalie Matt Mensinger went down anticipating a shot, Odberg fired into the roof of the net at 4:08. At 5:16, Logan Engelstad shot one off the goal pipe, pounced on the rebounding puck wide to the left, and lifted it over the sprawling goaltender.
“After the second period, we were down 1-0 and I told our team we could sneak up on them,” said Bergland. “And we did. Our gas tank was full in that third period.”
But the Hawks never lost their poise; they just turned up the attack. Kolquist, a versatile defenseman, saw Matt Lord take a rebound behind the net, attempting a wraparound. When it didn’t beat goaltender Jon Narverud, Lord regained possession and chipped the puck out into the slot. There was Kolquist, angling in from the point, and he drilled his shot into the left edge of the net from 25 feet at 6:16 for a 2-2 tie.
The Hawks had to kill a penalty until the 10-minute mark, then Thomas scored what Plante refers to as a goal-scorer’s goal. “you know how goal-scorers are,” said the coach. “They throw anything toward the net and it goes in. Other guys can’t throw it into an ocean.”
Thomas actually wasn’t trying to score. He was on the right boards when Andrew Mattson sent a hard pass through the crease and over to Thomas. “I knew Chris Benson was in the slot and I heard him yell,” said Thomas. “I tried to pass it to him.” But Prowler defenseman Riley Olson moved out to prevent Benson from deflecting Thomas’s pass, and as luck would have it — goal-scorer’s luck — the pass glanced off Olson’s skate and into the net at 11:45.
Then it was up to Hermantown’s team defense to hold the 3-2 lead, a task the Hawks have done regularly. The victory made the Hawks 30-0, and their No. 1 rank was secure for another night, but it didn’t stop Plante from a little showmanship, knowing his team was up against a Twin Cities private school powerhouse. St. Thomas Academy and Breck have won the last four state Class A titles, and Hermantown was the title-game victim of the last two.
“Yeah, isn’t that something?” Plante said. “We’re 30-0, we just set a school record with our 30th win, and we’re the underdogs, no matter what the ratings say. It’s hard for us to compete with these teams down here. We’ve got 600 kids in our school, and if we could draw from all of Northern Minnesota we’d have, what — 100,000 people? They can draw from about eight billion people down here.
“All of our kids played in our youth program. A couple families have moved into our area, but we’ve taught most of ’em how to play in our youth program. We had 40 kids out for the team, and we kept 35. Our goalie coach builds us a goalie every year. It takes a couple years, so they only get to play as seniors. They’ve never been out of Hermantown until we bring ’em down here.”
Mensinger, a tall, lanky 6-foot-3 goaltender, laughed at that but agreed in principle. “I got to come down here last year, and I got to play for 4 minutes and 7 seconds.”
His play, and the team defense surrounding him, are the true keys to the Hawks success.
“Boy, they play well defensively,” said Thief River Falls coach Tim Bergland, a former Prowler, Gopher, and NHLer. “We did too. Both teams limited the quality scoring chances. They were on top of us in the first period, and we had to stretch things out and try to force their defensemen back.”
The Cadets (25-5) got a second period goal from Peter Krieger, who was at the crease to convert a pass out from Tony Bretzman at 14:06 of the middle period, and goalie David Zevnik made it stand up by stopping all 25 Breck shots. If that game represented the Class A Private School Championship, both St. Thomas Academy and Breck could take a lesson from Hill-Murray and Benilde, a pair of small-enrollment private schools that play hockey where they belong, in Class AA.
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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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