The Boston College men’s hockey team fell to Vermont in a shootout on Friday night, failing to pick up a win over the two game series this weekend. The Eagles looked to have this game won, sporting a 4-2 lead late in the third period, but Vermont scored twice with the goalie pulled to tie things up and none of BC’s three shooters were able to score as they came up short in the shootout.
BC played a much cleaner first period on Saturday night after the debacle that was Friday night’s opening 20 minutes.
They had a dangerous looking power play early, easily killed off a Vermont man advantage of their own, and generally carried the play for most of the early part of the game. They got on the board first later on in the period, when Teddy Stiga fired home an absolute laser of a wrist shot from the top of the circle to make it a 1-0 game.
They were able to double their lead less than a minute later, when sophomore defenseman Kristian Kostadinski got a shot through some traffic for the first goal of his BC career and followed it up with an incredible bit of celebrating with his teammates to give the Eagles a two-goal lead after 20 minutes of play.
Vermont got themselves right back in the game early in the second period, scoring on a power play goal after Oscar Hemming took an interference penalty just a few minutes in. BC had some chances afterwards, including a breakaway attempt from Stiga that the forward lost control of just before he was able to get a shot off. Vermont took advantage of BC failing to extend their lead and tied things up with about seven and a half minutes left in the period, scoring on another shot from distance that managed to beat Louka Cloutier. Stiga made up for his mistake and gave BC back the lead, however, scoring on a bomb of a one-timer after a nice passing play just as a two-man advantage expired for the Eagles. BC had a few more really good chances to regain their two-goal lead before the period ended, but nothing went in for them and they had to settle for a 3-2 lead heading into the third.
The Eagles didn’t waste any time getting on the borad in the third, as Jake Sondreal scored his second goal of the season on a wrist shot from just inside the blue line that found its way through a ton of traffic in front not even two minutes into the period. They did a great job shutting down the Catamounts for most of the rest of the period, and they didn’t really give Vermont many good looks at the net until late in the period. Vermont managed to get a goal back with 2:24 on the clock after pulling their goalie, and then scored the tying goal with just over a minute left in regulation, again with an empty net, and the two teams headed to overtime tied at four.
Jake Sondreal gave the Eagles a power play chance in the overtime period with a fantastic individual back checking effort and BC had three or four really good scoring chances over the ensuing two minutes, but they were not able to break through and they had to settle for ending things in a shootout. All three Eagles were stopped in the shootout and Vermont’s final shooter, former Eagle Michael Hagens, managed to beat Cloutier to give Vermont the shootout win.
The Eagles may have gotten a point out of this in the end and this game might go into the books as a tie, but this absolutely feels like a loss with how they choked away what should have been a regulation win. They’re still well under .500 on the season and we’re now over a month in, and they’ll need to start stacking some wins together soon if they don’t want things to start going completely off the rails. They’ll have a chance to get back on track next weekend, when they take on UMass on Friday and Saturday night in a home-and-home series.
