Defined by a slurry of penalties, the second period between No. 2 Boston College men’s hockey and Vermont contained just about everything except clean hockey.
Down a man for the first five minutes of the frame after Gabe Perreault’s cross-checking penalty sent the Eagles’ co-leader in points off the ice for the night, BC dug deep to hold onto its one-goal deficit.
“Since we’ve had a few injuries in the last month or so, we’ve been doing a lot of juggling,” BC head coach Greg Brown said. “It wasn’t that unusual, and the guys have done a good job of adapting to whoever they’ve been playing with. There’s a lot of flexibility.”
Coming into the road game, the Eagles boasted the top penalty kill in the nation with a .917 killing percentage. But two power-play goals for the Catamounts in the first period—one for Joel Määttä and one for Sebastian Törnqvist, both natives of Sweden—made BC’s elite unit look as though it had taken a beating.
The Eagles knocked off the rust, however, with a goal midway through the second period from Eamon Powell’s point shot. A second five-minute major in the game, this one called on Vermont’s Daniel Sambuco for slew footing, sealed the Catamount’s fate. BC vaulted into the lead on goals from Ryan Leonard and James Hagens in the period.
While the Catamounts brought the affair back within one on a Colin Kessler tap-in goal, the Eagles (23–6–1, 15–4–1 Hockey East) hung on with Michael Hagens’ first career goal and an empty-netter by Andre Gasseau. On a night of 50 combined penalty minutes, BC defeated Vermont (11–15–3, 6–11–2) by a final score of 6–3.
“It’s too many,” Brown said. “We didn’t manage our emotions well in certain situations. In other situations, I thought maybe we didn’t get the right call. Either way, we have to be smarter.”
Sloppy neutral zone play in the first frame impacted the Eagles on the defensive end, and Vermont led in shots at the end of the period, 13–6.
BC failed to put a shot on net for the opening five minutes, and Vermont took that as a gift and ran with it.
After Gentry Shamburger picked up a two-minute minor for hooking, the Catamounts created a perfect look for Määttä with a tic-tac-toe passing sequence, and the senior forward slotted in the first goal of the night.
A bar-down rocket off the stick of Will Skahan knotted up the score at one apiece, but the tie game was short-lived.
The referees sent Powell to the box for hooking for the remaining two minutes of the frame, and Törnqvist rifled a shot to the top-right corner of the net, cementing a 2–1 goal advantage for Vermont.
“We weren’t quite on top of our game, and Vermont came out very fast, put us under pressure,” Brown said. “Because we weren’t 100 percent ready to go, we took some penalties and we got behind the eight ball, and they were able to capitalize.”
Out of the top 13 goaltenders in Hockey East, UVM’s Axel Mangbo ranked 12th in save percentage (.891) going into Friday’s contest. When shots on goal started to work in favor of the Eagles in the second frame, the first-period version of Mangbo became a shell of that netminder.
BC’s graduate-student captain, Powell, initiated the fall of Mangbo with a snipe after entering the zone with a clear angle on net, and then Sambuco’s five-minute penalty ensued.
Shortly after, Leonard slotted home his NCAA-leading 26th goal of the year—and 100th career point for the program—with a point-blank look from the mid slot, which handed the Catamounts their first deficit of the night.
Hagens spread the icing on the cake with another power-play goal, his ninth of the season, to make it 4–2 with a little over six minutes left in the second, and his brother put the cherry on top.
“It’s great to see Mikey get rewarded because he’s played a lot of good hockey this year,” Brown said. “Of course, James has a lot of eyes on him for the player he is and the situation that he’s in with the draft. But Mikey goes about his business like a professional.”
The shots-on-net margin began to increase in an exponential manner for the Eagles. At the end of the game, BC had the leg up in shots, 34–32.
Letting up Kessler’s goal did not appear to fatigue or reset the Eagles back to their first-period form, and BC struck twice more in the third to start off the road trip to Gutterson Fieldhouse with a bang.
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