Divisional Final

The Renegades Hockey Team advanced to the divisional final after knocking off the Padres.  This final round, against a team called the Itchy Beavers, has been our toughest challenge so far.  We played the first game on Wednesday night, and weren't really prepared.  At one point before the game was even half over, we found ourselves behind by a score of 6-0.  We started playing a little better later in the game, and made it a little closer.  The officials did a poor job calling the game and let things get out of hand at the end.  I'm not sure why the other guys were getting so hot-headed and emotional as they had the game well in hand.  We ended up losing by a score of 8-3.  There was a big scrum at the end of the game and two players on each side ended up getting suspended, including two of our best.  I thought I played a pretty decent game for an old guy.  I was only on the ice for one goal against, but was on for two that we scored.... a plus/minus rating of +1.  Not bad in a game that we lost by five goals, or so I thought.  I should have got credited with an assist for one of ours as I made a nice breakout pass on on of our goals, but the officials screwed that up too.

Then earlier this evening we played game two of the best of three series at Clareview Arena.  Our game was on an extra big Olympic size ice sheet.  The rink is a little longer and the neutral zone is bigger, but most noticeably, the ice is quite a bit wider.  This made for a lot of extra skating and adjustments were needed to the way that we passed the puck, and the way we defended.

We were ahead by a score of 2-0 about halfway through the game, despite having a shorter bench with only 11 skaters, and two of our better guys suspended.  The Beavers battled back and score three goals late in the second period to take the lead.  But we came out in the third period, after the flood, and took it to them.  We scored three unanswered goals and eventually coasted to a 5-3 victory.

This sets up the final game of the series tomorrow.  As team captain and manager I'm working to fill the roster and get all of our best players out to the rink.  We want to win this championship for our team mate Vince, who was recently stricken with a brain tumor and has been unable to play.  If we can win tomorrow we will move on to the best of five Conference championship.  In my mind that is sort of a bonus round, as it is against the winner of the South division 8, and we only played those teams a handful of times during the season.  There is a much greater sense of satisfaction if we can come out victorious in our own division, against the teams that we played all season long.

Can't shave the playoff beard yet........!!