HAMILTON, N.Y. — The No. 9 Bobcats found themselves in the box far more frequently than they found the back of the net Saturday afternoon, scoring just once but racking up a season-high six penalties in a 4-1 road loss to No. 3 Colgate.

With 21 penalty minutes between them, the conference rivals somehow only managed to play about two periods of full-strength hockey. 

“I didn’t love all the calls,” Bobcats head coach Cass Turner said. “But I also think we could have done something to keep ourselves out of the box too.”

It was a top-heavy game, with the vast majority of the action coming in the first period.

Raiders sophomore defender Sydney Morrow and Bobcats graduate student defender Kate Reilly scored 63 seconds apart about halfway through the frame to keep the game tied at one.

Then less than two minutes after Colgate sophomore forward Elyssa Biederman’s go-ahead goal, senior forward Kristýna Kaltounková capitalized on a two-player advantage to put the Raiders up 3-1.

“We didn’t start the game the way we needed to,” Turner said. “Colgate played really well, and they capitalized on some really good opportunities.”

But the first-period frenzy quickly turned into a second-period slog.

Neither team managed to put another point on the board in the second frame, but the Bobcats racked up as many penalty minutes as they took shots (four).

It didn’t help, of course, that a coach’s challenge took what would have been Quinnipiac’s second goal of the game off the board 17 seconds into the second period.

And it certainly didn’t help that junior forward and starting left-winger Maya Labad — who leads the team in shots and is tied for second in points — exited the game in the second period with what appeared to be an upper-body injury.

It didn’t get much better in the third period, either. 

With 16 shots on goal and an empty-netter, Colgate rattled off as many shots in the final frame as Quinnipiac took all afternoon.

Quinnipiac, meanwhile, took its sixth penalty of the game — a feat it last accomplished in September 2022 — but again only managed four shots on goal.

“It’s a team that’s going to work hard to get under your skin,” Turner said of Colgate. “I thought we let it get to us a little bit, so it’s definitely something we need to keep getting better at.”

After going 1-1 against two top-10 ECAC Hockey rivals this weekend, the Bobcats are gearing up for another kind of rivalry — the Nutmeg Classic.

“When you’re competing for a championship, it’s always really fun,” Turner said.

Quinnipiac is slated to face UConn on Nov. 24 and either Sacred Heart or Yale on Nov. 25. The game times have yet to be announced.