January
27, 2007
WAYNE -- With a slew of freshmen and a team that had, for all intents and purposes, never played together before, the Bergen Catholic ice hockey team found itself in a difficult position playing their Gordon Conference schedule.
The Crusaders came into the beginning of January something of a lamb, not scoring and losing close games. They’re going out at the end of January more like a lion, getting that extra goal or two along with solid goaltending.
On Friday night at the Ice Vault, they continued their resurgence, defeating Don Bosco by a 3-0 score and putting themselves in a solid position to qualify for the Gordon Cup tournament.
“When we pass the puck, we can play with anybody,” BC head coach Dan May said. “For some reason, we don’t pass the puck for all 45 minutes. If we get to the point where we don’t take shifts off, I wouldn’t want to be the team playing us in the playoffs.”
The Crusaders got the all-important first goal at 6:04 of the first period while on a 5 on 3 power play, as C.J. Ganass moved the puck to Ray McCourt, whose shot bounced off a defender and slid to Di:Piazza near the right post.
“It didn’t come to me clean,” DiPiazza remembered. “It glanced off of a defender’s stick.”
Armed with the lead, Bergen kept taking the play to the Ironmen, who had trouble generating any consistent offense against BC netminder Tim Carr. Hes stopped all 12 shots for his second shutout of the season.
“Once we beat Seton Hall, we started getting the confidence,” DiPiaza said. “That boosted us up and that’s when we got our momentum.”
“We had a lot more shots that went wide. We had enough scoring opportunities to win the game,” DB head coach Matt Nielsen said. “We got a bad break on the 5 on 3 and (goaltender) Brian (Beneke) has two shots he’d like to have back now, and that’s the difference in the game.”
One of those came at 7:43 of the first, as DiPiazza moved the puck to Ganass at the right point. His shot was stopped by Beneke, but the rebound came out to Nick Maniaci in the slot. He sent it past Beneke (13 saves) for the 2-0 lead.
McCourt got the third goal on a weak shot that Beneke misplayed, with DiPiazza getting the assist, and the score at 2:45 of the second period knocked the wind out of Bosco.
“That one really hurt us,” Nielsen said. “I know Brian wants to have that one back. At 2-0, we felt were right in it.”
In the third period, BC went to
a heavy defensive posture, driving only one shot on goal.
“You can see they’re more confident,” May commented. “We
actually came in here tonight expecting to win.”
“We haven’t peaked, we haven’t played a full 45 minutes of hockey in a game yet,” May noted. “We’ve got three league games next week, and we’ll learn a lot more about our team after that.”
Don Bosco fell to 3-8-1 overall, while Bergen Catholic won its third out of four to move to 5-7 overall.
“We challenged our guys to put three hard periods together,” Nielsen said, “We hadn’t done that all year, and this was the best we’ve done all year. The pucks just didn’t drop for us.”
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