Shamrock Playdowns 4
Submitted By jjohnston on Thu 03 01, 12
Our Atom AE Stars made the long drive to Mooretown Wednesday night to conclude the first round of the Shamrock playdowns. We needed a win or a tie to guarantee ourselves a spot in the next round, or it would go to the tie breaker math formula to decide our fate with a loss.
It went to the math! Our boys continue to struggle with those long drives on school nights, and I continue to struggle with the even longer drive home after our performances. We took a 4-1 drubbing in a game that the boys heads were not in. Their legs were moving, I'm just not sure where to. Thankfully, the line of Ethan Bradley, Jared Parkin, and Liam Armstrong had a good game, and generated most of our offensive chances. Jared was robbed point blank twice, and with his shot it is a testament to how well positionally Mooretown's goalie was playing. They finally got one in the third when Owen Wookey and Jared managed to chip the puck out of our zone and send Ethan in alone down the wing. He pulled back and fired a hard, low shot far side that beat the keeper. That cut the lead to 3-1 and sparked us a bit as we seemed to be getting more chances. Oops, another brain cramp, 4-1. Markus Thompson battled all game long wearing a "cursed trapper" that Mooretown's backup goalie was nice enough to lend us after Markus' didn't make it into his bag. It was a sign of the way the night would go for us, so on to the math.
West Lorne and our Stars both had a somewhat disappointing round robin with one win apiece. We should have had a tie in game one but I won't keep whining about that. ( I will, just not for the rest of this article.) Two teams, one spot available in the next round. The formula " Goals For divided by ( Goals for + Goals Against) pulsing through my head, highest % moves on. Better get out the calculator for this one. West Lorne =0.36. St. Thomas =0.38. It's an eight, it's an eight!!! We're number two, we're number two!! Without Ethan's goal we were done. It turns out to be the goal of the year, because it kept our year going. I had done an entire chart of all the possible outcomes of the game and knew exactly what we had to do in this game. If we scored one, we could give up four, and of course, being the cardiac kids, who I'm positive are trying to send me to an early grave, that is exactly what we gave up. I was still a little anxious awaiting confirmation that we had gotten through, but my math was correct and we get to play a series against Lambton Shores in the next round.
Just good enough boys!