The Bobcats haven’t suffered an official loss at home since Feb. 8, 2025 when they fell to the Clarkson Golden Knights 3-2. What do these two games have in common at the first glance?
Both times it was junior goaltender Dylan Silverstein in the net for Quinnipiac.
Before tonight, Silverstein led the nation in goals against average with 1.524. He made 24 saves on the night, the same as Cornell’s freshman goaltender Alexis Cournoyer, but the six shots he let in decided the contest.
Quinnipiac was neck-and-neck with Cornell for most of the night, at least when it comes to the shots and shots-on-goal.
The difference was made at the goal line, as Cournoyer played a brick wall for the Big Red for almost the entire game.
“Cournoyer was great tonight,” Pecknold said. “He made some saves, I would argue he’s the best player on the ice tonight.”
Freshman forward Ben Riche netting his first collegiate goal would be the highlight of the game for the Bobcats, as every other shot would end up just wide, just high or in Cournoyer’s glove.
The Bobcats lacked any sort of grit, any sort of buy-in, anything that would’ve revived them after a slow start.
“Cornell was excellent tonight, we struggled,” Pecknold said. “It’s frustrating, we just didn’t play well, we were flat.”
It was as if the Bobcats hit a door stop after a series of great games for the past few weekends. The usual high scorers and play makers were nowhere tonight. Freshman forward Ethan Wyttenbach, who leads the nation in points, had only a fourth game with no points to his name in the entire season.
Him and his linemates, junior Mason Marcellus and freshman Markus Vidicek were on ice for four of the Cornell goals.
“They were better, it’s probably the best team in our league,” Pecknold said. “A lot of our top players were struggling tonight. They couldn’t reset, they thought it was gonna be easy and it wasn’t.”
Cornell, on the other hand, had a team full of stars tonight. Freshman forward Aiden Long was the first one to put the Big Red on the board, adding three assists to his name later in the game.
Sophomore center Charlie Major netted two behind Silverstein and sophomore defender Luke Ashton, freshman winger Caton Ryan and junior center Jonathan Castagna each bested Silverstein once.
Most of the opportunities for Cornell came from simple Quinnipiac mistakes that the Big Red punished the Bobcats on over and over again.
“We are trying to grind here for a Cleary Cup and we didn’t grind tonight,” Pecknold said.
On a more positive side, both teams played a completely clean game with no penalties.
“I’m not gonna comment on the officiating,” Pecknold said. “Zero-zero on the powerplay, that’s crazy.”
Senior defenseman Charlie Leddy made his way back on the line-up sheet tonight after being absent from the bench since early January. With senior forward Jeremy Wilmer out for the rest of the season, Leddy’s return might bring back some of that senior experience that the team is lacking.
The Bobcats are now going to have to reset going into tomorrow’s senior night match-up against Colgate, looking for three -point win to stay in the contention for the ECAC Regular Season Championship title . Puck will drop in Hamden at 7 p.m. .
“I gotta get out of the media room first but we’ve done a good job of it the whole year and we always reload and we’ll be good tomorrow night,” Pecknold said.
