St. Mary’s boys hockey falls to AC

LYNN – For 45 minutes on Wednesday at Connery Rink, the St. Mary’s hockey team battled tooth and nail with Arlington Catholic in a Catholic Central League/Large battle.Unfortunately for the Spartans, they got behind 3-0 in the third period and dropped a 3-1 decision to the Cougars.Click here for a photo gallery.The game, however, was marred by an ugly incident following the postgame handshake that saw the teams wind up in a near bench-clearing brawl and having five players each suspended for the next two games.For the Spartans, the suspensions will cost them defensemen Casey Goll and Cam Kennedy and forwards Derek Stella, Andrew DiMaiti and James Perkins.”It’s unfortunate that something like that had to happen at the end,” St. Mary’s coach Mark Lee said. “Because that was an exciting Division 1 hockey game. It’s hard to be upset about the loss because of the effort we gave.”The Spartans (7-4-0) had knocked off AC in the season opener and were facing a team that had given up a 3-0 lead to Bishop Guertin (NH) in a 4-4 tie on Monday. And the Cougars played like a team that needed to prove a point.”This really was a character-building game for us,” AC coach Dan Shine said. “We kind of let a game get away from us the other day that shouldn’t have and this was even bigger, because it was a league game.”Things didn’t start well for St. Mary’s as it spent three of the first six minutes playing shorthanded. But the Spartan PK unit did the job, keeping the game scoreless.The Spartans got the game’s next two power plays but the AC penalty kill also was up to the task, keeping the game scoreless until the final moments of the first.That’s when John Needham picked up a rebound of a Paul Kehoe shot and tapped it past Donald Hesse with 33 ticks remaining to give AC a 1-0 lead after one.”Whenever you give up a goal with 30 seconds left in the period, it kind of bursts your bubble a little bit,” Lee said.Midway through the second, the Spartans would spend three minutes on the man advantage but AC held them to just one shot on goal in that time.”We’ve been playing our kill a little passive and we switched to a more aggressive kill and in the end, I think it paid off there,” Shine said.Seconds after the second power play ended, Hesse made the save of the game when he robbed James Murphy on a 2-on-1 bid.Once again, though, the Cougars found the final minutes of the period to their liking as defenseman Shawn Power picked the corner on a wrist shot from the right circle with 2:53 left to make it 2-0 after two.”That’s something we haven’t been doing lately, getting goals at opportune times,” Shine said. “We’ve been missing those and (Wednesday) we took advantage of those chances.”Early in the third, Needham got his second goal of the game to stake the Cougars to a 3-0 lead.That goal served as a wakeup for the Spartans as Cam Kennedy’s end-to-end rush resulted in an unassisted goal that cut the lead to 3-1 with 8:47 remaining.Yet despite swarming around the AC net for the rest of the game, the Spartans could get no closer.”I am so proud of this team. They worked their butts off (Wednesday),” Lee said. “We had our opportunities and couldn’t find the back of the net.”