Thursday, April 11, 2013

Renegades - Playoff Game Two

The Renegades played game two of the Division 11 Playoffs in the Edmonton Recreational Hockey League on Wednesday night.  Even though we finished the regular season in first place, there are a couple of teams that moved down from higher divisions, late in the season, that really challenge us.  One of those is the Gators, and this was the team we faced on Wednesday.  It was a hard fought battle against a very fast, very big team that likes to play really rough, and takes a lot of penalties.  We kept ourselves in the game all night long and the score remained very close.  Late in the third period we found ourselves down by a couple of goals.  We rallied and put on a really strong push to try and tie things up.  We got one goal, and then pulled our goalie for an extra skater.  We had a number of chances to tie things up but just could not quite do it.  We ended up falling in defeat by a score of 4-3.  The shots were close at 28 to 32 for the Gators.  There were a lot of penalties... around 20 minutes for each team.
As a result of this first loss in the playoffs we did not move on to the final.  We now have to play a game on Friday evening against the Wolf Pack.  The winner of that game will advance to the final round against the Gators.  The Wolf Pack are another team that has moved down from a higher division and really challenged us this year.  In our three meetings during the regular season, they won all of them.  We now need to dig deep as a team and put together our best possible effort to attempt to advance to the final.  
Two teams in our division did not even make the playoffs; the Icebreakers and the Buzzards.  Three more have already been eliminated; the Klondike Maulers, the Oil City Wings, and the Ice Hawks.  This next game now becomes our most important of the year as we need to fight to stay alive and move on to the finals.

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