Box Score
MENOMONIE, Wis. – After three games, the shoulders of the Saint Mary's University men's hockey team must be getting pretty sore from all the climbing they have had to do.
For the third straight game, the Cardinals found themselves staring at a deep, second-period hole Friday evening against UW-Stout.
And, unfortunately for the Cardinals, the holes just seem to be getting deeper and deeper.
After falling behind by three goals in a season-opening 4-2 loss to St. Thomas last Friday and by four goals in a 4-0 loss to Saint John's the following night, the Cardinals were down by a goal just 38 seconds into the opening period against the Blue Devils – and by the time the second period was over, UW-Stout had turned a 1-0 nailbiter into a 5-0 runaway in rolling to a 6-1 victory.
“Giving up that goal right off the bat certainly didn't help us,” said SMU coach
Bill Moore. “But after that, I thought we settled down and played pretty well through the first 20 minutes.”
Then came the second 20 minutes – 20 minutes Moore would like to forget.
The Blue Devils got two goals from Andy Sternberg and one each from Scott Motz and Joel Gaulrapp, as UW-Stout put the game out of reach with those four unanswered second-period tallies.
UW-Stout would make it 6-0 on Robert Carr's goal 50 seconds into the third period, before
Morgan Shepherd (Brainerd, Minn.) finally got SMU on the board, netting his first goal of the season - on an assist from #A.J. Woodward# (Lenexa, Kan.) – at 18:17.
“We've got to find a way to play in the second and third periods with the same intensity as the first,” said Moore, whose team outshot the Blue Devils 9-8 in the opening period, but were outshot 14-6 in both the second and third stanzas. “At times, I thought we played very well, but at other times, we weren't so good. We aren't nearly as consistent as we need to be.”
Jason Horstman (Faribault, Minn.), making his first collegiate start, finished with 30 saves for the Cardinals, who are back in action Saturday, traveling to St. Olaf for a 7 p.m. nonconference contest against the Oles.
