Blocked shots, intensity, a little feistiness here and there.
“It was a playoff-style hockey game,” Brent Thompson said. “They lost the night before. We’d lost a couple in a row. It was playoff-style intensity.”
“Everyone in the room knew what we had to do,” Eansor said.
Eansor’s goal gave them a lead. They gave it back. They pulled it out in overtime.
“I thought we were better in the third,” Thompson said. “better execution on the breakout. The first two (periods), they were relentless on us.
“They’re a good, hard-nosed team. We’re hard-working.”
It seemed like they met every year in the playoffs in the last decade; it wasn’t, obviously, just three times, and the last of those nine years ago now. Bridgeport has won only one playoff game against anybody else since then.
If this is the playoff game they get, well, it didn’t end on a “real” goal, but what the heck, it was a fun one to watch. And Bridgeport’s five-game winless streak is no more.
……
Kristers Gudlevskis is day-to-day, lower body, after departing early in the second period. (He passed me as I was talking to Sebastian Aho, and he passed again on the way out as I was talking to Scott Eansor.) Thompson said they’ll evaluate day to day; Eamon McAdam comes up from Worcester off a win tonight, and they’ll see what happens from there. (There were problems with box scores in both leagues tonight; the Railers won 5-1 behind McAdam’s 26 saves, if it’s still not updated. Bill Ballou says Matt Gaudreau could be out awhile. The Railers don’t play Sunday.)
So who was the next option, I wondered as Christopher Gibson slowly regained his feet after a pileup? “T-Bone!” Thompson said afterward. Chris Terreri wasn’t quite stretching yet. They’ve also got video coach John Vazzano and equipment manager Leni DiCostanzo on the depth chart somewhere. Thompson said he’d go to assistant equipment guy Brent Sopko first. (Brent was walking by at the time, so take that as it comes.)
Tanner Fritz’s misconduct was for unintentionally throwing equipment out of play. I haven’t seen it in a while, but it’s one of those fun automatic rules: Looked like he flipped the puck out of play after the buzzer.
These are quite unofficial, as in the olden days I never saw scoring changes, but I’ve got Devon Toews now tied for second in all-time Bridgeport overtime scoring (regular season, at least). Jeff Hamilton was 6-1-7, and now Toews joins Rob Collins at 2-4-6. Five guys have six points (Trevor Smith and Bracken Kearns both 1-5-6), and I think Toews is the first to put up three points twice. (The caveat is that while four-on-score boosted offense from the Good Ol’ Days, three-on-three revs it up even further. But still.)
Prescout. A stint with the Flyers evidently didn’t take away Danick Martel’s ability to score goals.
Luke Galvin’s 1-0. Meanwhile, Niklas Vasiljevs had a goal and an assist for Cheshire tonight, and darn am I old, you guys.
And local boy makes good in the NFL.
More tomorrow.