Marauders Drop Last-Second Heartbreaker on Opening Night

Senior Will Smith opened the season 

scoring with a shorthanded goal. 

The Marauders dropped a heartbreaker on opening night as their dramatic comeback was thwarted with a last-minute Londonderry goal and the visiting Lancers went home with a 3-2 victory.

The Marauders took the ice to begin their 2016-2017 season in front of an unusually full house for a school night. Energy and expectations were high, but Hanover soon found itself shorthanded with the first penalty call coming at just 1:09 into the game. The potent Lancer powerplay was held at bay and it looked as if Hanover would kill the penalty safely when senior defenseman Merrill Neiman found the back of the net off a feed from forward Troy Muldoon.

Most of the rest of the first frame featured a lot of back-and-forth between the two teams with few quality scoring chances. Hanover mustered only two shots on goal in the period, both handled by senior goaltender Cody Baldwin. It looked as if the teams would head into the intermission with a 1-0 Lancer lead, but the guests doubled the margin with just over a minute left to play when Patrick Cohen fed a breakout pass up the left wing to Bryan Murphy who jetted past the Hanover defense to walk in alone on goalie Gabe Loud and beat him high to the glove side with a wrist shot into the top corner.

The Marauders came out with renewed determination in the second, but their momentum seemed thwarted by a five-minute major penalty call to senior defenseman Patrick Logan. However, fellow senior defenseman Will Smith sent a jolt into the Hanover bench when he finished an aggressive shift of penalty killing by wristing home a feed from David Lehmann for a shorthanded tally to cut the Lancer lead in half. Smith, however, would soon find himself sitting next to Logan in the box and Hanover found itself two-men down for a full two minutes.

In many ways, Hanover played some of its most inspired hockey during these next two minutes, with TJ Beaver, Braxton McNulty, Jensen Dodge, Jake Acker, and Jonny Goff cycling through the three-man unit and aggressively thwarting the Lancer two-man-up attack. As the clock showed 7:51 to go and Smith hit the ice to bolster the Hanover penalty kill once again, the momentum seemed to swing further in Hanover’s direction.

Just over three minutes later, with both penalties successful behind them with the one-goal deficit intact, Hanover went on the powerplay themselves. The Marauders seemed to fully capture the momentum when senior captain Jonny Goff buried a laser wrist shot into the net off a feed from freshman Rowan Wilson, just called up from the JV, with one second remaining on the man-up. With the score knotted at two apiece, the teams headed to their respective dressing rooms and prepped for the final period.

The intermission seemed to come at an inauspicious time for the host team, as the momentum they seized in the second seemed to swing back to the visitors in the third. The Lancers outshot the Marauders 8-2 in the final frame, although Loud was equal to the task on all but the final shot. With mere seconds remaining, senior forward Sean Cotter was taken hard to the boards by Logan behind the Hanover net, but somehow managed to throw a centering pass into the slot. Junior Michael McCormick was left unmarked as he streaked in front of the goal and slammed home the game winner with a mere sixteen seconds left in the game.

Hanover will look to rebound as they travel south to Salem for the Blue Devils' season opener on Friday night at 8:30pm at the Icenter, the site of the Marauders’ dramatic come-from-behind victory in the state playoffs last year.