SPECIAL REPORT: 1997 CORNELL NORTH COUNTRY ROAD TRIP
by Joe Schlobotnik
[...]
Saturday Night, 1997 January 4: Clarkson
Note: This will be much more personal and less factual than the
previous game's report, due in part to the fact that I was unable to
take notes because of the way I watched the game.
(Potsdam, NY) There are reasons for dreading the North Country road
trip that have nothing to do with the long drive, and Cornell and its
supporters got a big helping of them Saturday night.
Mom and I, having run out of things to do in Potsdam, showed up at
Cheel about 90 minutes before gametime, and thus had a long time to
contemplate the place. I never saw a game at the old Walker Center,
but Cheel seemed to have all of the advantages and disadvantages you'd
expect from a new rink. Building a mini-student-union around a hockey
rink is a nice idea, but of course the arena itself felt much less
cozy than Appleton the night before, what with the individual numbered
seats. But the Wall of Fame running around the top was nice. The worst
thing about the arena to me was that the visitors' seats were split
into two groups, one on the goal line and one behind the visitors'
bench.
We did have the pleasant surprise of running into Greg Berge and his
party, who, unbeknownst to me, had been the only three vocal Cornell
fans to remain in their original seats behind the goal the night
before. We all had a nice pre-game chat with Arthur Mintz (in which we
learned that I was hoping for three points going into the weekend,
Arthur wanted four, and Greg would be happy to escape with two). In
the midst on the conversation, Clarkson fired off their blasted train
whistle. Mom and I flinched as all other sound was drowned out, but
Greg noted that it wasn't nearly so annoying as hearing it after a
Clarkson goal.
Once the section began to fill in, we were unable to stay with Greg,
Anne and Christine. Mom's and my seats were in the front row (note to
myself--remember to ask for seats in the *back* of the section at away
games), and the well-defined individual seats, along with the more
stolid Cornell fans who insisted in sitting in their assigned seats,
made it hard to just squeeze in as we usually do. Eventually, we
convinced Cornell bandies and sometime HOCKEY-Lers Rich Hovorka and
Scott Southard to fit us into the SRO row where the band was
stationed, this night without their instruments. Of course, the prime
standing spots were already cramped by then as well, but we managed it
by having me look over Mom's head.
The game itself started well enough for Cornell when Matt Cooney
scored his first goal since the injury in the first, seeding hopes
that the Cooney-Tymchyshyn-Auger line would have a big night, and
Elliott managed to keep the Knights off the board despite Clarkson
having something like a 2-to-1 shot advantage.
When Kyle Knopp slid the puck through the five-hole of a kneeling Dan
Murphy to give the Red a 2-0 lead midway through the second, the
Cornell contingent went wild at the prospect of a three-point weekend
(although with a bit of trepidation of the team's inability to hold
two-goal leads in the past). The post-goal celebration, which had
gotten a bit derailed after the first goal when the crowd drowned it
out, was quite exuberant, with Scott and Rich running down the line to
give high-fives. After the obligatory "Davy" and chants, the
personalized taunts to Murphy began, led by "Dan-O, the goalie with
the hole in the middle". I'm not sure what Rich said that made the old
lady in front of him (the Cornell SRO ended up behind the adjacent
Clarkson section) turn around and snap at him. Nothing I heard struck
me as particularly "baaa-d".
Scott was just organizing a Goalie/Black Hole cheer against Murphy
when a penalty intervened. Cornell's Steve Wilson went to the box, I
speculated for just being himself. There was originally a matching
penalty against Clarkson's Carl Drakensjo up on the board, but after
Clarkson lobbied, it was taken off, leaving Clarkson on the power
play. The penalty was two minutes for hitting after the whistle, or as
it was promptly coined, "Wilsoning". This turned out to be the turning
point of the game, as Clarkson converted to close the deficit to 2-1,
and we got to hear the train whistle for real. Less than a minute
later, Cornell's David Adler turned the puck over on Clarkson's right
point and had to hold the Knight player to avoid a breakaway, drawing
another penalty. The decline of Cornell's penalty kill continued as
Clarkson scored again to make it 2-2.
After two games without a power play, Cornell did get a few, but
didn't look particularly good on them. The officiating, in contrast
with the consistently hands-off approach taken by the crew at St.
Lawrence Friday, was another John Murphy head-scratcher. In the first,
it seemed that any marginal call would be made. But then later on he
seemed to be laying off, only to tighten up again at the end. But I
suppose he is at least consistantly inconsistant.
Cornell's collapse continued with two more Clarkson goals in the first
half of the third, and the Red were unable to put anything together
despite spending much of the end of the game on the power play. The
biggest missed opportunity came when Cornell was whistled for too many
men early in a power play, only to regain a 4-on-3 shortly thereafter
when another Clarkson player was sent off.
The turnaround was complete when the Clarkson band, now looking at a
two-goal lead, informed Cornell goalie Jason Elliot (who ended up with
37 saves on 41 shots) that he was a black hole. Mike Schafer pulled
Elliot while on the power play, with a minute and a half to go, and
Cornell skated 6-on-4 and 6-on-5 for the rest of the game. Several
Clarkson shots went wide of the empty net, and someone suggested that
perhaps skating six was a good defensive strategy for the Red. But
then Clarkson's Chris Clark, already with two goals to his credit,
sent the puck the length of the ice with the last few seconds ticking
off, and we all watched, Clarkson fans with elation and Cornell with
dread, as it slid into the net with one second left on the clock to
complete the hat trick and make the final score 5-2.
This was, obviously, a pretty disheartening loss for Cornell. It
seemed that, like the young team they are, they panicked once Clarkson
got on the board and never recovered. I wonder what motivational tools
Schafer will turn to now; I'd expect that Captain Matt Cooney's
all-senior line will be called upon to lead. The Red visit Michigan on
Tuesday, and it seems that they couldn't have picked a worse time to
play the defending National Champions. A week ago I would have thought
they actually had an outside chance of beating the Wolverines, and
would most likely leave with a confidence-boosting close loss. But now
I'm afraid it will look more like last year's blowouts against
Michigan State, BU and Colorado College. The goaltending is the one
bit of good news, as both goalies played well again this weekend
(Pelletier, who looked lucky early on in his last two games, seems to
have gained confidence); when they're called upon to face 79 shots in
two games, they can hardly be blamed for stopping only 74 of them.
Turning to the atmosphere at Cheel, the sellout crowd was certainly
hostile, but most of the chanting seemed to be coming from the band.
The most impressive was their post-goal "sieve" cheer, which I found
not quite as devastating as BU's, but which does have a lot of
variety. I presume that the relative lameness of the rest of the
crowd. The most amusing event was probably late in the third, when the
scoreboard display read "Stand up and cheer", which gave the
impression that some in the crowd might have forgotten to do so
otherwise. (Of course, that was when the mass movement towards the
exits began as well, so I joked that the sign might have said "Beat
the traffic".) The graphical scoreboard is really a mixed blessing,
since when it read "Let's Go Tech" and the crowd didn't respond, it
looked a little foolish. One surefire way to get a Clarkson cheer
going was for the Cornell fans to chant "Let's Go Red", which would
invariably get the Clarkson band to start a "Let's Go Tech" cheer
which would drown us out. Unless they chose to reply "Better Dead than
Red." While we were still winning, a few people could respond "Better
Red than Dead." (The sellout provided an additional handicap against
Cornell chants, since the noisiest fans were relegated to a single row
in standing room and the back of one section, and couldn't form a
cohesive block as at Syracuse or St. Lawrence.) The dopiest things
about Cheel were those little 8 1/2" by 11" color signs that lined the
glass, with assorted exhortations about beating the Little Red.
Someone (I think it was Greg Berge) made up counter-signs for
Cornell-- the best was:
WHO IS THE CURRENT ECAC CHAMPION
CROWNED IN LAKE PLACID 1996!
CLARKSON
OR
CORNELL
BIG RED
The Clarkson band itself made me realize why they're Cornell's
competition for best pep band in the ECAC [I got to see both bands
last March at Lake Placid, and did notice them while squinting through
the glare of Cornell's brilliance. ;-)] I still think that they should
lose the electric instruments, but I do like their rendition of
"Caravan" and I admit that their post-goal tune is still rattling
around my head a day later. I also regret that I didn't manage to
bring a tape recorder and start my collection of New World Symphonies.
(In contrast the the sped-up versions of the national anthems and
"Caravan", they seem to play New World at a more languid pace than
usual.) Of course, the best thing of all was that for the first time
in six games I didn't have to hear "YMCA".
Then there's the train whistle. I find it kind of ironic that this is
in arena where according the program, "No artificial noisemakers are
alllowed [sic]." It is very impressive, though, as opposed to that
silly air horn at St. Lawrence. I never saw the Bell in its heyday,
but it would have been more impressive if they hadn't rung it at
seemingly random times ("Yay, we completed a pass at the red line!").
The whole impression of the whistle and bell produces an image of the
pep band as a locomotive about to roll onto the ice.
The North Country Experience
I liked the closeness of the two arenas; we met various people Friday
night and Saturday who'd been at who'd been to the Colgate-Clarkson
game and compared notes between that and Cornell-St. Lawrence. And the
two towns were filled with partisans for all four teams, giving a nice
mix of perspectives on the four games. I guess something like that
could happen in Boston, but I can't think of where else in College
Hockey. In fact, it's a bit of a shame that the Clarkson and St.
Lawrence games happen at the same time so that one can't attend both
of them. (Although I guess that would make Clarkson tickets even
harder come by.)
I had actually been to Potsdam a couple of times, once ten years ago
visiting Clarkson as a high school senior, and once in 1993 for my
sister's graduation from Potsdam. My mother had made the trip rather
more times, but that still didn't help us find activities to fill the
eight hours between our motel checkout Saturday morning and the start
of the Cornell-Clarkson game. As an example of the dearth of
stimulation, Greg and his crew spent the day exploring nearby Massena.
We were comparing the situation to going straight from breakfast to
the 1pm ECAC consolation game at Lake Placid, and Arthur Mintz pointed
out that in Placid, there were things to do, if not time to do them.
This time, we wound up in the lounge at the Best Western watching the
Packers-49ers game, where we learned that their definition of "free
refills" meant that you got one free 7-ounce glass of soda for every
one you bought. Presumably this was not the reason that the teams now
stay at the Comfort Inn. Speaking of hotels, I would be remiss if I
did not mention Mrs. Smalling of the Smalling Motel, who let me use
the phone in her kitchen to post my report on Friday's game. The rooms
may be small there, but you can't beat service like that.
Finally, the five-hour drive home after Saturday's game was not as
difficult as I'd been dreading (even if it did keep me from writing
this until I got back to Utah). I didn't get the benefit of the
adrenaline rush I had after the game Friday at St. Lawrence, but
stumbling onto a shortcut back to 56 made up for the three roundtrips
between Potsdam and Canton on the weekend.
Despite watching our team take only one point on the weekend, Mom and
I did enjoy going on the ECAC's most legendary roadtrip. I'm sure I
would have preferred the experience of the Colgate fans, who saw their
team sweep, but losing a bad game in hostile territory hundreds of
miles from home is a very real part of the experience of a sports fan,
and what makes sports the purest form of entertainment. Happy endings
are not guaranteed, which makes the ones that happen much better.
With the North Country road trip report, this is Joe Schlobotnik.
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Last Modified: 1997 January 6
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