HAMDEN — No. 12/13 Quinnipiac men’s hockey checked off its first box en route to Lake Placid, N.Y. on Friday night, taking Game 1 of the ECAC Quarterfinals 4-1 against Brown.
“You know, our backs are against the wall here,” graduate student defenseman Cooper Moore said. We know that it’s do or die right now, and we’ve been working all year to this point, and we’re feeling really good about our game right now.”
Although the quarterfinals are a best-of-three conquest, it’s imperative the Bobcats complete the sweep Saturday afternoon.
Losing to a bottom-seeded Bears squad even once will likely push Quinnipiac outside of its slim at-large bid range for the NCAA Tournament and add that much more pressure on the team to win the conference.
But for tonight, the Bobcats can appreciate how far they’ve come from the early days of October, even if Friday wasn’t an overly dominant outing that was muddled with small mistakes.
“It wasn’t our best game,” head coach Rand Pecknold said. “I thought we were sluggish at times, but we even found a way to battle a little bit. Brown was really good.”
Early in the opening frame, Moore zinged the puck through traffic, which then deflected off of junior forward Victor Czerneckianair’s stick for the Bobcats’ first goal.
Around the four-minute mark of the second, junior forward Jeremy Wilmer executed a near flawless tic-tac-toe passing sequence, starting with freshman defenseman Elliott Groenewold, then Wilmer, back to graduate student forward Travis Treloar and finally reaching Wilmer’s skates again to bring it home.
To put what appeared to be the final nail in the coffin, sophomore forward Andon Cerbone potted Quinnipiac’s third of the evening in the waning minutes of the final period — on the power play no less — off a feed from sophomore wing Mason Marcellus.
Pecknold has repeated several times this season that Quinnipiac tends to play multiple games across three periods of one, highlighting its glaring inconsistencies and inability to capitalize when the opportunity arises.
And just when it looks like the Bobcats have matured one weekend, they often revert the next. Whether that reigns true through the quarterfinals is yet to be seen, but Friday did showcase a side of Quinnipiac that plays with some ease.
“There are times where we try to make a little bit too cute of a play,” Moore said. “I think we’re starting to finally learn that if we play simple, smart, fast that like, that’s our game, and that’s how we’re gonna beat teams.”
Then again, it could afford to be shaky — and waste eight penalty minutes — against a lower-tier Brown. With five minutes remaining in regulation, sophomore center Tyler Kopff got Brown on the board to snap sophomore goaltender Matej Marinov’s shutout performance.
“He was great,” Pecknold said. “Played really well. You know, we kind of hung on with the guy on the six-on-four goal.”
Saturday afternoon will determine if Quinnipiac heads to Lake Placid for the conference semis or remains at home for one more bout in the quarterfinal series. Puck drop against Brown is set for 4 p.m.
“Not even Lake Placid but Pairwise too,” Czerneckianair said. “(Tomorrow) it’s such a big game for us. That means just as much as the next one. I think we just got to come together.”
