What a weekend! The last time SJU beat St. Thomas in a playoff game was in 2003. This is one streak that was broken, but there were a lot of streaks that also continued for SJU.
For most of you, things started on Saturday at 7pm and finished with an OT win against the Tommies around 9:15pm. For me, things started at 6am Friday morning when I brought my wife to the hospital to have our third child! My wife had our baby (Luca John Schueller) at 5:19pm on Friday night and was listening to Jeff Brown and 660 the Bear on Saturday night with all the nurses. I can’t tell you how happy I was to get the win, not only for the guys on the team, but for my wife who does so much for me and my career in hockey.
So enough of the sappy stuff! How about that win and that performance by the seniors! I have to give a very big shout out to #7 Andrew Commers for his game-winning, OT goal and how well he has lead this team all season. Right with him is #15 Joe Freemark for his game-tying goal with less than two minutes to go in regulation. And finally to #29 Saxton Soley, for once again being our backbone and coming up with some huge saves throughout the game. All of the seniors have been playing great and have been leading this team through these very tight and stressful games.
The streak continues and we are now undefeated in our last 10 games (8-0-2). Unfortunately, we continued a trend that I am not as excited about in giving up the first goal. We have now given up the first goal in 7 of our last 10 games, but we have won all 7 of those games. The funny thing is that in Blog #4 “Breaking A Streak” I talked about the fact that we had not won a game where we were scored on first for almost two years. Now we have won 7 games in a row that we have had to come from behind. Trust me in that this is not a trend that I want to rely on down the stretch, but it is a great feeling knowing that we are always in the game and that this team NEVER GIVES UP!
Another trend that continued is that we have now out-scored our opponents in the third period 27-5 in the last 10 games. Another impressive streak this season is that we are now 8-0-1 against MIAC opponents on the road in the regular season and playoffs. In order for us to play in the NCAA tournament, this streak is going to have to continue for one more game.
The MIAC championship game will be held this Saturday at Augsburg. Augsburg won the MIAC regular- season championship and has the top seed and home ice advantage. As many of you know, we were able to beat Augsburg twice to finish up the regular season. Augsburg is a very talented team that is playing very good hockey. They have depth, goaltending and a high level of confidence. But, we have a lot of those same things, and we have the confidence that we have beat them twice in the last two weeks. I am not naive in that I know we have to play our best game of the year to get this win, but our guys know what it takes to win and how they need to play to get it done.
Thanks for following SJU Hockey and for your continued support. I also want to thank all the alumni, family and friends of Johnnie hockey that came out to the game this past Saturday. It felt like a home game and we can’t thank you all enough. Let’s do it again this Saturday!
