July 12, 2006
Nationals Rewind: Day 3
Saturday, April 8: Rivermen pound Black Bears to earn Championship Sunday berth
UMSL 10, Maine 1
Maine 0-0-1 - 1
UMSL 5-4-1 - 10
Pointscoring
Maine: Christopher Warren (1-0-1)
UMSL: James Wetton (1-4-5), Adam Clarke (3-1-4), Zach Stacy (1-3-4), Jake Shepard (2-1-3), Doug Purk (2-0-2), Jason Shields (1-0-1)
In the NCRHA Div. II quarterfinal, the Rivermen were happy to draw the Maine Black Bears.
It was perhaps UMSL's fiercest effort. Fueled by a strong dislike for their opponent, the Rivermen matched the Black Bears' customary over-the-top intensity and blasted Maine off the rink to the tune of a 10-1 explosion.
The game was never in doubt. UMSL took a 4-0 lead less than five minutes into the contest, pushed it to 7-0 by the halfway mark, made it 9-0 at the second intermission, and took a double-digit lead 2:30 into the third.
The only blemish was a meaningless Black Bear goal scored 9:59 into turbo-time.
Bad Blood?
During the 2004 tournament in Anaheim, the Rivermen had confronted Maine twice, losing a round-robin matchup before winning the teams' semifinal. Before both games, the Black Bears had skated through UMSL's zone during pregame warmups, as if to say, "this is our house." The second time, the Rivermen saw it coming and dished out some pregame punishment before ending the Black Bears' season.
There was no warmup act before the Maine-UMSL quarterfinal at the '06 championships. Maine realized the power of its top seeded, 27-3-1 opponent, and this time the men in blue trod lightly.
There would be no spitting in the face of this monster.
But the disrespect would not be forgotten in time to save the Black Bears.
UMSL's Ben Lambert was part of that '04 team. The rough-and-tumble veteran forward hadn't forgotten Maine's warmup antics. And now, two years later, one unfortunate Black Bear gave Lambert a chance to set the tone.
While skating back to receive a pass during a warmup drill, Lambert noticed that the Maine warmup line had straggled considerably across center, into the UMSL half of the floor. So as he passed, Lambert sneakily stabbed his stickblade into the calf of the Maine player standing at the back of the line.
Dirty? Maybe. But Lambert and his teammates remained deeply offended by Maine's intimidation attempt. And so the harmless jab was delivered, just to be sure the Black Bears hadn't forgotten who they were up against.
UMSL had also tired of the sideshow from the Black Bears, whose antics had become legendary. Maine often engages in a public pregame ritual during which each player chugs Red Bull through a funnel and tube (a beer bong), held by a player standing atop a spare net. At ECRHA Regionals, Maine players had supposedly brought a fully functional chainsaw to cut two-by-fours in the pregame dressing room.
It's harmless and sometimes hilarious, but opponents don't like it.
Game time...
This Maine team, while just as scrappy, wasn't quite as talented as the '04 final-four outfit. The star-laden Rivermen knew they were good enough to win a slow-it-down game that would end with a 4-1 or 6-2 score.
But restless and agitated after an unusual 20-hour layoff, UMSL was prepared to drive it deep.
The Rivermen relentlessly hammered the Black Bears, taking a 10-0 lead before a third-period goal made it a 10-1 final.
Adam Clarke pushed the Rivermen ahead on the first shift of the game.
James Wetton had found Zach Stacy with a 150-foot outlet pass for a clean break-in from the left wing. Maine goaltender Drew Borkovitz sprawled to stop Stacy's backhand, but Clarke pounded the rebound into the cage to give UMSL a 1-0 lead with just 41 seconds gone.
Jake Shepard scored just 1:31 later, after combining with Wetton on a slick, savvy breakout play that gained easy passage across center for the superstar forward.
Wetton and Shepard set up the Rivermen breakout behind the UMSL cage. Shepard emerged without the puck, but faked a pass to the right side, drawing the defense a step the wrong way. Shepard turned back to the left-wing boards and streaked up the floor as Wetton hit him in stride with a bank pass.
Shepard took it to the house as Wally Iverson bulldozed his way to the doorstep. Shepard's 20-foot snapshot beat Borkovitz to put the Rivermen ahead 2-0 at 2:16 of the first.
From there, frustration derailed any chance at a Black Bear comeback.
At 3:04, Mike Trimm and Nick Ditto were penalized for throwing blatantly illegal bodychecks on Shepard and Iverson.
Trimm's hit on Shepard was similar to the knockdown hit a day earlier by Nevada beast Devon Hume during the third period of UMSL's 10-3 blowout of the defending champ Wolf Pack. It was almost a carbon copy of the knockout attempt laid on Shepard by Cal Poly SLO's Ray Pung at the tail-end of the teams' Winter Invitational tie in January.
Basically, a dirtball play.
Ditto's hit was less fierce -- but only because Iverson doesn't move quite as fast as Shepard.
At that moment, fiery intensity became blazing rage.
It took just 13 seconds for the UMSL power play to punish the Black Bears when Doug Purk blasted a rising slapshot that whistled past Borkovitz's glove and found the top shelf. With 8:43 still remaining in the first period, UMSL had a 3-0 lead and 1:47 left on a 4-on-3 power play.
Clarke soon made it 2-for-2 when he blasted a glove-side one-timer into the top corner of the net after Shepard dropped the puck to Wetton for the pinpoint cross-rink pass.
Seconds earlier, Clarke had kept the puck moving by winning a one-on-two battle beside the net, in the process taking a hard high-stick to the trachea and being lassoed to the floor.
After shaking off the attempted strangling, Clarke moved back into position in the left-wing circle and one-timed Wetton's pass into the far-side top corner of the net. It was the second of three goals for Clarke, who would notch his third hat-trick of the season, and was the second of four assists for Wetton, who finished the game as the tournament's runaway leader in assists (19) and points (26).
The rout was on. With 7:21 still left in the first period, the Rivermen led 4-0.
Purk's second power-play goal of the game made UMSL 4-for-4 on the man advantage. The Rivermen had built their second 5-0 first-intermission lead of the tournament.
The second period belonged to Zach Stacy.
The fifty-goal scorer showed his puck-control sensibilities when he extracted the disk from a battle and carried it around the perimeter of the rink, all the way back to the UMSL zone.
When Stacy emerged, he turned on the jets, using Clarke's legal, no-contact "pick" to burn past everyone on the floor before showcasing his wicked finishing skill with a top-shelf flip shot for a 6-0 lead.
Late in the period, Stacy repeatedly beat three Maine defenders to ridiculously win a prolonged battle below the goal line before feeding Shepard a centering pass for a point-blank shot, which found the twine with 21 seconds left in the second for UMSL's ninth unanswered goal, Shepard's second of the game and 13th of the tournament. See Stacy's incredible play here.
Wetton would score his seventh goal of the tourney, on a power play early in the third, before Maine's Chris Warren scored his team's final goal of the 2005-06 season, breaking up Thomas Ames' sixty-plus-minute shutout streak with four minutes to go.
UMSL brought everything Saturday night, and it showed. The only question was having enough goals left for Championship Sunday.
James Lambert