DULUTH, Minn. — The Saint Mary's University men's hockey team did something Friday evening no other Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Coinference team had been able to do all season — beat St. Scholastica.
Brady Lindauer (Cary, Ill.) recorded his first collegiate hat trick and the Cardinals scored seven goals for the second straight game, dealing the league-leading Saints their first setback in 13 conference games with a 7-4 victory Friday evening at Mars Lakeview Arena.
And with the chase for one of the five MIAC Playoff berths heating up, Friday's performance could not have come at a better time.
With the win, Saint Mary's improved to 7-6-0 in conference play and climbed all the way to fourth place in the standings, one point in front of Bethel, two points up on St. Olaf and three in front of Concordia with three MIAC games to play.
There were goals aplenty in the game's opening 20 minutes as the two teams combined to score five times. St. Scholastica scored early and late in the opening stanza — opening the scoring at 3:44 and ending it at 18:59.
In between, however, it was all Cardinals.
Kasyn Kruse (Luverne, Minn.) answered the Saints' early goal with one of his own at 5:20, and, four minutes later,
Callahan Nauss (Maple Plain, Minn.) found the back of the net to give SMU its first lead of the game, 2-1.
Gabe Potyk (Lake Orion, Mich.) got into the act less than three minutes after Nauss's tally to extend the Cardinals' lead to 3-1, before CSS's Carson Richels rounded out the high-scoring opening period with a goal with 1:51 to play.
The first-period intermission did little to silence the two offenses, as SMU and CSS each added two goals in the middle frame — with the Cardinals taking over the early- and late-period scoring detail this time around.
Kellen Tharaldson (Wausau, Wis.) pushed the Cardinal lead back to two, 4-2, just 5:39 into the period, only to have St. Scholastica answer with back-to-back goals by Alec Severson and Nathan Adrian to make it a 4-4 game with 9:53 to play.
The Cardinals would regain the lead before the period ended — thanks to Lindauer's first goal of the game with less than six minutes to play — to take a 5-4 edge into the game's final period.
And Lindauer wasn't finished — not by a long shot. The Cardinal senior netted his second straight goal less than two minutes into the third period and added an empty net tally with 10 seconds to place to complete his first collegiate hat trick — and seal the Cardinals second consecutive victory.
The Cardinals (6-6-0 MIAC, 10-10-1 overall) and Saints will complete their two-game MIAC series on Saturday, squaring off in a 2 p.m. matinee at Mars Lakeview Arena in Duluth, Minn.
