"Slip slidin' away,
Slip slidin' away.
You know the nearer your destination
The more you're slip slidin' away....".
1-3-1 in last five.
The Potsdam game gave us a brief glimmer of the "good ol' days" in the late 2000s when the goals could come in basketfulls- tick-tack-toe- BANG. Since then we have scored three goals and we let in 14 (yeah a few were empty-netters). YIKES. I don't fault the goaltenders- the guys in front of them left them hanging far too many times.
Yeah, the team seems lost most of the time. Brief spurts of intensity- mainly when we're down by two goals- but other than that not much fire. It seems if we get down one goal we're like "ah, we can come back, no problem", two goals "OK, now we gotta get back into this", three or more: "nope, we're done..". Canton, Hobart, and Geneseo all played intense, disciplined, strategic hockey games and we were no match for any of them.
Canton coach Boak came into the Deb with a plan and his team executed it for the entire game. I don't know what Mark Taylor puts in Hobart's Gatoraid but that team is 60 MINUTES OF INTENSITY. And Geneseo remembered the shutout from November and showed up prepared to avenge it. We were no match for any of them- whether they were ranked #1 or #47.
Our team has the talent, so coaching, leadership, and discipline have to be suspect at this point. Yelling at the refs doesn't get you very far.
So we're left again with having to run the SUNYAC to get in. The common wisdom is "we're going to have to knock off Hobart", but at this point there's real uncertainty that we will make it that far.
On the bright side- it's very cool that we finally get the excellent live WTOP broadcast (with replays!) up on the video board at The Deb! That only took like 20 years... but worth the wait.