Smith, Golden, Magrane go out in grand style

BOSTON – Completing their careers on the hallowed sheet of ice at TD BankNorth Garden was a pretty cool idea for St. Mary’s seniors Alex Smith, Michelle Golden and Kelsey Magrane.Winning a second consecutive state championship in perfect fashion? That probably would have been unfathomable at the beginning of the season.Yet on Saturday night, there stood the three seniors at center ice holding a second straight Division 1 championship trophy thanks to a hard earned 1-0 win over a very game Woburn team that gave them an astounding 51 consecutive wins to finish their careers.Even after retreating to the locker room and letting it all sink in a bit, the three Spartan stars still had a hard time believing what they had accomplished in their final two seasons on Tremont Street.”It’s definitely unbelievable,” Smith said. “I thought that we’d have a pretty good team this year and it definitely was a dogfight against the teams we played.”St. Mary’s head coach Frank Pagliuca perhaps paid the ultimate compliment to his three seniors after the game.”Michelle, Alex and Kelsey have been outstanding all year. They kept this young group together, and that was so important. They were tremendous this season,” Pagliuca said.For Golden, the accomplishment was something that seemed far out of reach two years ago, when the team lost in the state semifinals to Austin Prep. Little did she and her teammates know that it would be their final loss as scholar-athletes.”When we lost in the shootout, if you told us that we’d do this, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Golden said. “It’s a tribute to how everybody performed. It was a total team effort.”Magrane came to St. Mary’s last year after shining for Marblehead as its goaltender for two seasons. Her arrival may have proved to be the last piece of a puzzle for a Spartan team that was bound for the history books.”This team has been so good to me. They welcomed me in right away,” Magrane said. “It’s been such a great two years.”Saturday’s game against the Tanners was a microcosm of how talented the Spartans were.Eighth-grader Marisa Maccario will go down in the books as the scorer of a state championship-winning goal, while Smith led a defense of youngsters in holding Woburn to only six shots on goal. And when the Tanners did get a shot through, Magrane was able to hold the fort and make a pair of clutch saves down the stretch.”I wouldn’t have wanted to do this with anyone else,” Golden said about her fellow seniors. “I love both of these girls so much.”And when the Spartans needed to kill 1:27 to get the title again, it was the defense and Golden who pinned the puck along the boards in the Woburn zone to take up over a minute, leaving the Tanners hardly any time to mount a last-ditch charge.”We knew that we had to get the puck in their zone so they couldn’t pull the goalie,” Golden said.That was one last task accomplished as Golden and her fellow seniors checked off another championship.