LYNN – Never mind the 22 straight victories this season, and forget about the 47-game winning streak over the past two winters.Frank Pagliuca would rather channel Patriots coach Bill Belichick.The Spartans rolled past Franklin, 11-0, Thursday in their first MIAA girls hockey tournament game in defense of last year’s state title. And despite coming into the tourney unbeaten, and despite being an overwhelming favorite to repeat, Pagliuca cited “Belichick’s Book of Quotations” after the game.”Hey,” he said, “that’s over. Everyone comes in here at 0-0. And we’re going after the same thing everyone else is going after.”Despite his team’s experience in tournament games, there’s always the worry, he said, that the girls will come into the game tight.”Jitters,” he said. “You worry about opening-game jitters ? the nervousness. But thankfully tonight, we came out strong and were aggressive right away.”St. Mary’s scored so many goals that the scorekeepers at Connery Rink – at the request of the officials – stopped counting after seven. Senior captain Michelle Golden had a true hat trick (three straight goals) before the first period ended, and made it four for the night by opening the scoring in the second. And the Spartans went the entire third period skating players that don’t normally see game action, basically keeping the puck out of their own end and dumping it into theirs – and still managed to net their 11th goal of the night when eighth-grader Marisa Maccario netted a beauty with 3:09 left in the game.”I thought our forwards did a good job all night long of skating the puck through traffic,” said Pagliuca.The coach also said that in games like this – ones that are basically over early.”You want to keep the tempo of the game going,” he said, “but at the same time, you want to be able to use people who work hard in practice, but don’t always see a lot of action in games.”Toward that end, Pagliuca lifted goalie Kelsey Magrane midway through the second period in favor of Liz Giacchino – and the two of them combined for this shutout.Franklin came into the game with a 10-7-2 record, and beat Billerica, one seed higher at 16, in a preliminary game. But the Panthers were simply overmatched Thursday. It started early and stayed late, with freshman forward Genevieve Benoit committing larceny on a Panther player by stealing the puck right off her stick and tucking it past sophomore goalie Kailyn Burke, with assists going to the Donovan sisters, Bridget and Makaela.”I thought their line (Donovan-Donovan-Benoit) set the tone and played great all night long,” said Pagliuca.Then, Golden took over, getting the next three in rapid succession to make it 4-0.On the first one, at 4:05, she darted up right wing, deked a Franklin defender out of her skates, and bore in on Burke, beating her easily. On the next one (on the power play) she gook a goal mouth pass from Courtney White and rammed it home; and on No. 3 she rifled a shot that just made it past Burke on her stick side.Erin McAndrews made it 5-0, finding herself all alone in front of Burke and lifting one past her; and Courtney Winters scored the first of her two with only 19 seconds left in the period.The second period was essentially more of the same. Golden got her fourth, with assists from Courtney White and Winters, with only 1:53 gone, and White made it 8-0 (which is when they stopped keeping score) less than three minutes later. Bridge Donovan and Winters scored the final two goals of the period before Maccario wrapped up the scoring in the third.The Spartans are in Stoneham Saturday (at a time to be announced) to play either Lexington or Andover (the two teams played a late game Thursday night).
