HAMDEN, Conn. — No. 6 Quinnipiac women’s ice hockey shut out Brown 1-0 to open conference play Friday night after taking more than 40 minutes to find the back of the net for the third consecutive game.
“Our problem is probably a good problem — we just keep winning,” Bobcats head coach Cass Turner said after the game. “We keep finding ways to win, and that’s a huge confidence booster.“
The Bobcats and Bears share a lopsided history. In the 36 meetings that preceded Friday’s matchup, Brown had outright beat Quinnipiac only seven times. The Bobcats, who haven’t dropped a game against Brown since February 2022, have also never lost to the Bears in October.
So, with Quinnipiac riding a six-game win streak and Brown coming off a loss to Holy Cross, the teams’ 37th meeting seemed poised to follow the 20-year trend favoring the Bobcats.
And to an extent, it did. The Bobcats, now 7-0, dominated the 1-2 Bears in almost every statistical category — that is, except for goals.
The Bobcats recorded nearly two-and-a-half times as many shots on goal as Brown, with Bears senior goaltender Kaley Doyle facing more shots in the third period than Bobcats graduate student netminder Logan Angers faced all game.
In the end, it was senior forward Nina Steigauf’s tap-in goal that broke the 0-0 deadlock with under 15 minutes remaining in the final frame.
Steigauf, whose tally Friday marked her fifth goal and third game-winning goal of the season, acknowledged “it’s always cool getting the game-winning goal” but attributed the goal to a larger team effort.
“It’s not one person getting the goal — it’s basically the whole team,” Steigauf said. “That play wouldn’t have happened if my line wouldn’t have been there and the line before.”
But Steigauf’s goal was just one of 44 shots Quinnipiac put on Doyle Friday — already a bizarrely high number considering the final score.
And the box score doesn’t even include the 32 off-target shots that went just high or just wide of the net, though.
It doesn’t tell you about the seven shots that got caught in legs and skates in the slot and never even saw the net. Or about the three different shots that ricocheted off the post — and the audible reaction each dinger elicited from the roughly 340 fans in attendance. And it doesn’t tell you about the countless net-front rebound opportunities that always seemed just out of reach.
“I was excited about how many scoring chances we generated today,” Turner said. “There were a ton of good ones and, honestly, we played with a lot more grit around the net — even though we only got one goal — than we have been.”
And yet, for two periods and some change, Doyle and the Brown defense denied the onslaught of shots time and time again.
“Their goaltender played outstanding,” Turner said of Doyle. “It was impressive to see how they kept fighting to the very end.“
The team’s continued inability to score until the waning minutes of the game has nevertheless solidified Quinnipiac’s budding reputation as a “third period team.”
“We’d like to be a little stronger earlier, maybe,” Turner said. “But I think, for us, it’s just figuring out how to play our best hockey consistently throughout the game.”
At the other end of the ice, Angers made 18 saves between the pipes, including a handful of flashy glove saves and one sprawling net-front denial in the third period to keep the Bobcats alive.
“Obviously, it’s something that you feel good about,” Angers, who has put up a .85 goals against average and a .963 save percentage through seven games, said of her second shutout this season. “They didn’t get too much for opportunities and we kind of kept them to the outside, and that really helped us all as a team.”
Friday’s game in some ways served to set the tone for the team’s matchup against No. 5 Yale on Saturday.
“The girls are always up to play Yale, no doubt,” Turner said. “Last season, they had our number. The season before that, we had their number. So, we’re ready to take it back again this year.”
The puck is set to drop at M&T Bank Arena Saturday at 3 p.m.
