The Lake Superior State Lakers won the 1990 Syracuse Invitational Tournament, defeating the Lowell Chiefs in the finals. Scores of SIT games: Friday, 12/28: Lowell 4, Colgate 3 (4 OT) Lake Superior 3, Cornell 2 Saturday, 12/29: Consolation: Colgate 4, Cornell 3 Championship: Lake Superior 8, Lowell 3 Friday's action featured one terrific, well-played game and one pretty rotten and sloppy contest. As you can see above, one went four overtimes and the other was settled in regulation. Guess which of the two was emotional, thrill-packed, and exciting? Guess again. Lowell 4, Colgate 3 (4 OT) Let's just say that this was not a hockey clinic, except maybe for the performance of the two goalies. Lowell was for the most part unable to get the puck out of their own zone in the first period, but thanks to a great performance by goalie Mark Richards and Colgate's inability to convert on some wide-open scoring opportunities, the Red Raiders were only able to tally once in the first 20 minutes. Craig Woodcroft tipped in a blast by Marc Dupere at 7:17 while Colgate was on the power play. The second period looked to be a replay of the first, as Lowell again could not get anything going on offense. The Chiefs also were still having trouble clearing loose pucks away from Richards, and this would cost them another power-play goal at the 6:16 mark. Having already faced a barrage of Colgate shots, Richards went down to make a save on a backhander by Woodcroft, but the rebound floated over to Dale Band, who sent the puck right by the fallen goalie and into the net. The Lowell forwards were able to pick up the pace after this, however, and Normand Bazin put the Chiefs on the board less than two minutes later when he tallied off a scramble in front of the Colgate goal. A couple minutes after this, the Red Raiders had a golden opportunity to regain their two-goal lead, as they came up the ice on a 3-on-1, but they botched it so badly that they were unable to even get a shot off. The Chiefs tied the score at 12:05 of the second on what would turn out to be their only decent power play of the night, as Dave Pensa fired a shot over goalie Greg Menges' leg. In the third period, it was Colgate's turn to have trouble clearing rebounds, and Lowell went up 3-2 at 2:31 when Dan O'Connell picked up a loose puck and scored on a wrap-around. The game got pretty rough, probably due to the players' realization that referee Dan Murphy was not going to call much of anything. The Chiefs' Tim Smallwood also had a particularly bad third period, twice losing the puck at the Colgate blue line during Lowell power plays and later coming close to scoring the game-tying goal for Colgate, when he flipped a Red Raider shot into the air in front of his own net. (Richards was able to react quickly enough to deflect the puck) At any rate, the Red Raiders pulled Menges with 40 seconds left in regulation. The Chiefs were able to clear the puck out of their own zone, but they made a critical error in not following the puck down the ice, instead collapsing into a defensive shell. Thus, Dale Band was able to pick up the puck at center ice and pass it to Jamie Cooke, who tied the score on a 27-foot blast with 23 seconds left. Once the overtimes began, it appeared that no one was particularly interested in trying to win the game. Lowell was playing very defensively and was allowing the Colgate players to pass and shoot pretty much as they pleased, but the Red Raiders were not able to take advantage of this generosity. The Lowell power-play unit continued its dreadful performance, enabling Colgate to kill off two consecutive penalties in OT relatively easily. Even the Zamboni got into the act, as the ice was not resurfaced between the second and third overtimes. Oh, they brought the machine out, and it went around the rink as usual, but it had about as much effect on the ice as a broom would have had. (Actually, there were problems with the Zamboni throughout this tournament -- the guy would get an ovation when he left a halfway decent surface, which happened pretty rarely) Finally, and mercifully, the game ended with 19 seconds remaining in the fourth overtime period. As you might expect, the winning goal was set up by a crucial mistake on Colgate's part. Lowell's Scott Meehan got control of the puck in the left corner, and since no Colgate player went after him, he had plenty of time to send a long cross-ice pass through the crease (and past a few Red Raiders) to Dave Stevens at the right side of the Colgate goal. Stevens tipped the puck in, and that was it. Richards ended up with 46 saves for Lowell, while Menges had 45 for the Red Raiders. Lake Superior 3, Cornell 2 This was by far the best game of the tournament and probably one of the best of the season. Cornell was without top defenseman Dan Ratushny (Spengler Cup) and second-leading scorer Kent Manderville (World Junior Championship), and Lake Superior was missing their second-leading scorer as well, Doug Weight (World Junior Championship), but neither team seemed too affected by those losses. A surprisingly large contingent of Laker fans made the trek from the Soo to Syracuse for the tournament. Cornell had trouble keeping pace with a fast Lake Superior team in the early going, and the Lakers drew first blood with a power-play goal at 5:48 of the opening period. Mark Astley wristed a shot that deflected off someone's arm and beat goalie Corrie D'Alessio high on the glove side. Later, on Cornell's first power play, the Laker penalty-killers did not allow the Big Red to get anything started, stealing the puck several times and clearing it almost at will. However, Cornell picked up the pace as the first period went on, and the Big Red was able to gain more control of the game with some aggressive forechecking. Cornell got the tying goal at 14:35 of the first on the power play, when Bruce Frauley hit Doug Derraugh near the Laker goal with a great cross-ice pass. Derraugh then deked Lake Superior goalie Darrin Madeley and slid the puck by him. The second period featured a great deal of end-to-end action and some phenomenal play by D'Alessio, who came up with several outstanding saves -- including a stop of a point-blank slap shot while he was sprawled on his stomach. Lake Superior limited Cornell to only four shots on goal in the period, but the Big Red took the lead at 15:47 when Trent Andison stuffed in a rebound of a shot by Ryan Hughes. In the third period, it was Madeley's turn to be magnificent, as he denied Cornell on several scoring opportunities. The Lakers got the equalizer at 3:12 of the third, after intercepting a bad clearing pass. Michael Smith blasted one from the left circle that found its way through a screen and into the net. The Big Red had some chances to retake the lead; on two occasions the puck trickled through Madeley's pads and rolled *just* wide of the net. Lake Superior picked up the gamewinner with four and a half minutes left. Jim Dowd and Tim Harris skated up the left side and got by the Cornell defense to set up a two- on-none, and Dowd fired a high shot over D'Alessio's shoulder. Madeley then withstood a late Cornell flurry to seal the Laker win. He finished with 18 saves, while D'Alessio stopped 24 shots in a losing cause. All in all, it was the kind of game that is supposed to result whenever two nationally-ranked teams meet. By beating a game Cornell squad, Lake Superior showed pretty clearly why they have to be considered the top team in the country, and the Big Red's performance earned them a fair amount of respect as well. Okay, after that Lake Superior-Cornell contest, the games on Saturday couldn't help but be anticlimactic, but did they have to be THIS bad? The consolation featured shabby play that was highlighted by a few unbelievable mistakes, while the championship game was, well, simply ludicrous... Consolation: Colgate 4, Cornell 3 Colgate played about as poorly in this game as they did against Lowell, but they were opportunistic enough to take advantage of a couple of mental miscues on the part of Cornell. As for the Big Red, to say that they did not look like the same team which played so well against Lake Superior the night before would be a tremendous understatement. Jim Crozier started in goal for the Big Red for the first time in a month, and he did not look particularly sharp. For the Red Raiders, freshman Shawn Murray made his debut between the pipes, and he actually played pretty well. Colgate got on the board just 1:27 into the game, as Jamie Cooke scored the first of his three goals on a hard shot from near the faceoff circle. The Big Red evened the score later in the period, when Doug Derraugh backhanded the puck through Murray's legs. However, with less than three minutes to go in the first period, the Red Raiders took a 2- 1 lead thanks to a Cornell play that was confused at best and monumentally stupid at worst. First, Crozier skated out almost to the blue line to try to corral a loose puck and prevent a Colgate breakaway. Although his penchant for wandering far away from the net helped keep Crozier on the bench for his first two seasons, that isn't the stupid part. He collided with a Colgate player and lost his stick, then had to race back to defend the goal, leaving the stick on the ice near the left circle. Now, folks, if you are going to have someone on your team playing without a stick, it damn well better not be the goalie. Somebody should have gotten Crozier's stick to him or handed him theirs so he would have at least had SOMETHING. But the other Cornell players avoided both Crozier and the stick as if they were radioactive. Cornell did try to ice the puck to get a stoppage in play, and although icing was waved off, there was still plenty of time to get Crozier a stick, *any* stick. Instead, what did the Big Red do while Colgate was playing with the puck in their own end? They CHANGED LINES! Did any of the five new guys attempt to provide their goalie with a piece of lumber? Well, by now you should be able to guess the answer to that one. Crozier wound up playing without a stick for over a minute, while the Red Raiders worked the puck up the ice. Finally, Dan Gibson blasted a shot from the right point that beat Crosier on what would have been the stick side. After the goal, someone retrieved Crozier's stick, which was still comfortably resting near the circle. Both teams came out pretty slowly in the second, and Cornell's passing was particularly sloppy, especially on their four power plays of the period. Colgate went up by two at the 13:09 mark on another error by the Big Red. Cooke was credited with the goal after Cornell's Jim McPhee, in trying to clear the puck, accidentally knocked it into his own net. McPhee will unfairly wear the goat horns on that play, since it might have been nice if any of the other four Big Red skaters had tried to stop Cooke on his journey up the ice. He picked up the puck at his own blue line, skated across the rink, along the left side, and behind the Cornell net, without being bothered by anyone until McPhee (a forward, by the way) met up with him. The Big Red made it 3-2 just over a minute later. Murray blocked a wrap-around try by Joe Dragon but gave up the rebound to Trent Andison, who tapped it into the open right side of the net. The goal was the 50th of Andison's collegiate career. In an attempt to spark the Big Red, McCutcheon inserted Corrie D'Alessio in goal at the start of the third period. The move did fire up the Cornell team for a while, as D'Alessio played well and the Big Red tied the score at 8:45 of the third. Murray kicked aside a Dragon shot, but Jason Vogel corralled the rebound and fired a low shot which deflected into the net off Murray's pad. Four minutes later, however, Colgate regained the lead on a mildly controversial goal. With the Red Raiders on the power play, a slap shot by Cooke went into the net off the skate of Colgate's Craig Woodcroft, who may or may not have kicked it and who may or may not have been in the crease at the time anyway. The goal stood, and nobody from Cornell protested it. The Big Red had one more foolish play left in them, as Vogel was called for roughing with 2:06 left in the game, effectively slamming the door on Cornell's chances to rally. Murray had a great game, stopping 39 shots, while Crozier and D'Alessio had 11 saves each. This was the first time in four years that Syracuse Invitational host Colgate did not play in the tournament finals, while Cornell duplicated their fourth-place finish of 1988, the last time they played in the SIT. Championship: Lake Superior 8, Lowell 3 The Colgate and Cornell squads must have been pretty upset about their Friday night losses, but they could console themselves with the fact that they didn't have to deal with the officiating in the championship game, for whom the referee was (drum roll, please) Pierre Belanger! I'm sure the Lake Superior and Lowell fans were wondering what all the groaning was about when this fellow came out on the ice -- well, they found out soon enough. I noticed that he didn't pull his usual stunt of hollering at the players on their way to the penalty box, but he left his mark nonetheless. Lowell surprised the Lakers by taking a quick 1-0 lead on a delayed Lake Superior holding call. Laker goalie Darrin Madeley went down to block a shot by David Gatti and wound up facing the back of the net. Before he could turn around, Lowell's Don Parsons picked up the puck and flipped it over Madeley into the left side of the net with 3:11 gone in the game. Lake Superior took control after that, and Tim Breslin and Sandy Moger combined to tie the score a minute later. As Breslin brought the puck into the Chiefs' zone, Lowell goalie Dwayne Roloson went to the left side to block a possible shot, but Breslin passed to Moger on the right side, who tapped the puck in. Less than two minutes later, the Lakers took a lead they would never relinquish. Roloson went down too soon on a shot by Dean Hulett, and the puck whistled by his face and into the net. Lowell started doing some sneaky things later in the first period to try to slow the Lakers down, and the play began to get a little chippy. Early in the second, the Chiefs' Tim Smallwood got into it with Lake Superior's Jim Dowd, and they both were sent off with roughing minors. This looked suspiciously like a common situation in the pros, where one team's designated hit man picks a fight with the other team's best player in order to get him off the ice. I'm not trying to say that Smallwood is a goon, but the whole incident seemed just a little bit shady. Pierre actually had a very good first period, and I began to think that this man might finally provide us with a well-officiated contest. The second period, however, was a reality check. It all began very innocuously, with a call at 2:53 on Gatti for playing with a broken stick. Technically, it was a correct call -- the blade did break off, and Gatti did hold onto the stick for a little while before dropping it -- but for a guy who has the reputation of being a "player's ref" and "letting 'em play" (which Pierre has, believe it or not), it was pretty darn picky. The real fun started on Lake Superior's third goal, at 5:37 of the second period. Roloson went to the right side of the net to retrieve the puck, and a Laker player fell on top of him and stayed there for several seconds. Meanwhile, the net was wide open, and Mark Astley shot the puck into it -- while Roloson was being held down. There was initially a Lowell guy on top of the Lake Superior player who was on top of Roloson, but the Lowell player got off the pile long before the goal was scored, and the Laker player did not get up until afterward. As you might expect, the Chiefs exploded in protest. Roloson raced after Belanger and yelled at him for quite some time, as did most of the other Lowell players. After Pierre had managed to extricate himself from the crowd of angry Chiefs, Lowell head coach Bill Riley began hollering bloody murder, banged on the boards in front of the bench with a stick until it broke, then tossed the handle onto the ice. Belanger called a bench minor on him -- I'm very surprised that Riley wasn't ejected. Anyway, the goal stood, and Roloson fumed, cursing a blue streak and staying angry for so long that it affected his play. By now, the "championship game" had degenerated into a farce, and it only got worse. The Lakers made it 4-1 at the 9:02 mark, on a Jeff Napierala shot from between the circles. They appeared to score 35 seconds later, but Belanger ruled that the puck was kicked in. Well, now the Lake Superior squad was unhappy. At 11:32 of the second came the moment you're all waiting for -- a fight broke out. During a stoppage of play, a Laker player speared Lowell's Dave Stevens, who collapsed on the ice. No call was made, but several Chief players went after the Lake Superior guy, and a skirmish broke out in front of the Laker bench. All of a sudden, a real donnybrook developed between Lake Superior's David DiVita and Lowell's Don Parsons -- rolling around on the ice, trading punches, gloves and helmets off, the whole bit. They even knocked over a linesman who was trying without much success to break it up. Another little skirmish broke out between Smallwood and a Laker player, but that one was stopped quickly and they both received roughing minors; DiVita and Parsons were hit with game disqual- ifications. After what seemed an eternity, Lowell wound up with a 4- on-3 situation, which they promptly lost due to another roughing penalty. Ah, college hockey, don't you just love it? Lake Superior scored again (remember the game?) at 12:38, when Karl Johnston shot the puck over Roloson and just under the crossbar. A frustrated and peeved Lowell team began holding a lot, and several times it looked like there was going to be another fight, but the teams got through the rest of the second period without incident. At 1:36 of the third, Riley and his players, who were obviously still not thinking pleasant thoughts about Mr. Belanger, loudly argued about a clear too many men on the ice. I think that's a penalty you really can't dispute, especially in this case -- the extra man was a good three feet away from the bench. On the ensuing power play, the Lakers' Jeff Napierala made it 6-1 with a low slap shot from the left circle that eluded Roloson. Two goals within 25 seconds gave Lake Superior an 8-1 lead. At 8:32, Kurt Miller lifted the puck over Roloson's shoulder from the slot (the Lakers shot high pretty frequently on Roloson -- it seems to be his weakness), and then Sandy Moger beat Roloson on the glove side for his second goal of the night. At this point, I was wondering why Riley didn't change goalies -- perhaps because the only other Lowell netminder who was dressed was Mark Richards, who had played 80 minutes the night before. The ultimate irony in this contest occurred at the midway point of the third period, when Belanger got cut on his forehead and was administered to by the Lowell trainer. I could almost hear Riley muttering something about having the guy give Belanger a shot of curare. Lowell's power-play unit, which had been abominable all night, scored the last two goals of the game. At 16:31, Scott Wenham fed Dave Stevens from the left corner, and Stevens' shot deflected into the net off Darrin Madeley. Two minutes later, Shane Henry beat Madeley with a shot from the slot to make it 8-3. And then, this ridiculous game ended, and believe me, Belanger couldn't get off the ice fast enough. Lake Superior outshot Lowell by a 51-22 margin, as Roloson wound up with 43 saves (and a very negative attitude) while Madeley stopped 19 shots. The SIT All-Tournament team: Forward: Jamie Cooke, Colgate Jim Dowd, Lake Superior Jeff Napierala, Lake Superior Defense: Mark Astley, Lake Superior Karl Johnston, Lake Superior Goalie: Mark Richards, Lowell The MVP of the Syracuse Invitational was Lake Superior goaltender Darrin Madeley. Bill Fenwick Cornell '86 LET'S GO RED!! "This is our son 'Primo', so named because he was the first of two carefully planned children. This is 'Finalio', the second of our carefully planned two." "Uh, then who is THIS?" "Oh... this is 'Oops!'" -- "Broom Hilda"