Hockey nets four 3rd-period goals for revenge on NAU
Just more than four minutes into the third period of Thursday night’s 6-2 win against the Lumberjacks of Northern Arizona, NAU’s Michael Farnam put his stick into USU goaltender Dan Cornelius’s face on the breakaway in an attempt to score.
“He just got me in the face with a stick,” Cornelius said of the incident. “It wasn’t anything major, nothing I’m not used to, but I had to make sure they got the penalty. I embellished a little bit. We needed something just to get us going, and we knew a power play would give us the chance we needed.”
Embellishment or not, that’s when the Aggies took over.
“Anytime you see a goaltender go down like that, your first reaction is to protect your goalie,” Aggie captain Kent Arsenault said. “If you can’t protect your goalie, you go out there and do something better offensively. As soon as we saw that, we turned it up and realized we had something to play for. We’re not going to let them run over our hockey team in our own rink.”
At the time, USU and NAU were tied at two goals apiece. Already enjoying a power play, Aggie senior David Wyman took a punch to the head and put NAU on the short end of a 5-on-3 power play. USU took the lead less than one minute later, courtesy of Arsenault.
Arsenault’s goal was more than the goal that gave USU a lead it wouldn’t relinquish, it was also a USU hockey record-breaker. That swing of the stick made Arsenault USU’s all-time leading goal scorer at 206 goals in his career.
“Five years in the making,” Arsenault said of the record, “and it was one of my goals when I first came here to school. I told the boys I wanted to do it at home at some point during the season, and it happened that way.”
After taking a 2-1 deficit into the first intermission, the Aggies scored five unanswered goals, four of which came in the third period, and sent the Lumberjacks back to Arizona with a mark in the loss column.
Given the quality of hockey on display during the first two periods, however, it would have been difficult to predict that USU would come out with a four-goal win. USU simply came out flat, and several Aggies said the poor play was frustrating, especially considering that a 6-3 loss to NAU in early December prevented USU from taking the No. 1 regional ranking.
“We can’t let a team take us out of nationals and then lose to them a second time,” Cornelius said. “We’ve got to show them that was just a fluke. Tonight definitely shows that we are a better team than they are.”
“I was thinking we were going to walk all over them,” USU coach Jon Eccles said. “They came out flying. They were battling and chasing it. In the locker room we told the team, ‘We’ve got to play like we’re going to play at regionals and nationals,’ and they came out and that’s what we did.”
USU’s magnificent third period was capped off when Jeremy Martin squared up from 75 yards away and took a shot from USU’s zone at an empty net on the other end of the ice. To borrow a phrase from basketball, the shot hit nothing but net. The goal gave the Aggies the four-goal lead, and further sealed an already victorious outing.
“I was hoping he was going to drop it to me so that I could take the shot, but he’s a little selfish,” Cornelius sarcastically said of Martin. “I’m glad we got that though to put the dagger in their heart.”
USU next plays at the Eccles Ice Center on Saturday. This game against BYU will start at 8 p.m. to accommodate hockey fans who also want to attend USU’s basketball home game against Boise State, beginning at 7 p.m.
– la.hem@aggiemail.usu.edu