All kinds of Manchester victories

Lots of good stuff from the room (not counting Kyle Okposo’s excellent impersonations — no official word yet if he’ll be showing up Tuesday somewhere else), most of it on the theme of continuing to work hard in some way, shape or form. Capuano thought this was basically like the past couple of nights, with some better bounces. Colliton thought it was similar, with better attention to detail.

They finished with more GF than GA tonight, which is really all that matters right now with time running out. They are back in a position where, if they won the two games against Hershey and played everything else deadly even with the Bears and Senators, they’d sneak in by a point. That is too close, of course, but it’s fact.

To get there, they rode their horses. Mark Wotton played more than half of the third period. Jeremy Colliton came close in each of the last two periods. They killed penalties, they blocked shots, they took hits, and they ground it out.

And this time they even won.

BRIDGEPORT
F: Okposo-Smith-Fretter
Bentivoglio-Colliton (A)-Keith
Desrochers-Haskins-Bourne
Brennan/Morency
D: A.MacDonald-Fata (A)
Kohn-Ford
Fraser-Wotton (C)

PHILADELPHIA
F: Kane (C)-Potulny-Ross
Matsumoto-Ruzicka-Greentree
Grant (A)-Cabana-Powe
Zingoni/Grenier
D: Gauthier-Guenin
Jonsson-Anderson
Bartulis-Fitzpatrick

(Much thanks to Tom Liodice for help with the lineups. Speaking of which, here’s to the winners: Prep, Amity and Rockville/Manchester.)

Andy Sertich still looks rough but says he’s feeling a lot better. His absence meant the return of Andrew MacDonald.

A respected voice crept upon me tonight. “Who’d you think the best two players on the ice were?” I feigned a thought and pointed toward where Martin Houle hadn’t given up a goal. But his were Colliton and Smith, and mine were Smith and Colliton, so we were only off each other by an ordinal. (Maybe I’m biased because of the weekend thought process. See paper tomorrow.)

So WBS vaults over Albany into second; Jeff Hamilton is an intriguing absence tonight, Phil reports. The Bears lose to Winnipeg. Bingo needs overtime but gets two points from Rochester. And Norfolk can’t even finish third anymore.

Almost as impressive as Chris Pronger’s rap sheet is his list of victims. You don’t get a lot of Pat Peake references these days.

Wyatt Smith gets a call up.

And finally, “Robert Nilsson is proving that you should always bet on talent.” Heh.

Michael Fornabaio