After six, long, looonnnggg months the PSU women’s ice hockey regular season is over! We’ve battled it out against our conference opponents all year, but now the real battle begins! It’s ‘yoffs, baby! **(‘yoffs=playoffs)
We went into the playoffs feeling pretty good, but also knowing that we had a challenge in front of us as the number four seed. Just like every year, Central Hockey Association of America held playoffs in Buffalo, New York at the Harbor center. The rink that we played at was in a building on top of a parking deck that was connected to the stadium where the buffalo Sabres play hockey.
Not coincidentally, Terry Pegula (the generous founder of both Penn State hockey teams) also owns the Buffalo Sabres and the entire Harbor Center Complex, which includes the NHL stadium, the smaller arena we played in, and a really nice hotel where we got to stay. It was a super cool set up because the rink was just down the hall from the hotel lobby so we never had to leave the complex. (plus there was a Tim Horton’s coffee shop in the lobby which I went to at least like twice a day!)
The night before the tournament started there was an awards banquet held for all of the CHA teams, and Penn State swept up pretty nicely! Natalie Heising, our star freshman, won CHA Rookie of the year as well as being named to second team all-conference along with Hannah Ehresman, our senior goalie. Kelsey Crow, a junior defensemen, got the honor of being named to the first-team all-conference, which was a huge win for our program!
On Thursday, in the quarterfinal game we faced off against Lindenwood University, a team that we had beaten twice and lost to twice this year. We knew we were a better team than them, but their goalie was really strong, which had caused us problems in the past. It was a tight game the whole way through, but Lindenwood found the back of the net first, scoring a nice rebound goal late in the second period. Even though we were losing, we refused to let our season be end in the quarterfinal round, and miraculously, we scored two unanswered goals in the last 9 minutes of the game to go on to win 2-1. The first goal was an absolute bomb from Katie Macmillan on the power play, and the second was scored by Nat Heising from a short angle with only a minute and a half left in the game to seal the win and send Lindenwood back to Missouri.
As exhilarating as the win was, we had less than 24 hours before we had to turn around and face the #1 seed Robert Morris. Since this post is getting pretty long you’ll have to wait until the next passion post to find out our team’s fate in the playoffs!
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