The Prince George Farr Fabricating Cougars obviously wanted to construct a different ending to the Crossroads Cup than what transpired on the ice at Kin 1 Sunday morning.
On the final day of the 10-team bantam Tier 1 hockey tournament, they wanted to prove they were the best of the bunch.
But it was not to be. The Kamloops Blazers took advantage of the Olympic-size rink to score three power play goals and grab a 3-1 lead and went on to defeat the tournament hosts 6-1 in the semifinal game.
Stoked by a one-goal, two-assist effort from Logan Stankhoven, once the Blazers got ahead they put it into lockdown mode. They rallied around the big shadow cast by Luke Bateman, their mobile six-foot-three defenceman, who put up a wall at the blueline and punished Cougar forwards with his physical play along the boards.
It was a disheartening way to end the weekend for Cougars defenceman Jacob Gendron, who admitted he felt drained playing the archrival Blazers after the Cougars had put up three straight tournament wins to overcome an opening loss.
“It was a pretty hard game and I don’t know about the other guys but I was feeling it, especially on this big rink,” said Gendron, the Cougars captain. “We came out hard with our first goal on the PP and they got three quick ones and we sort of just dropped off from there.
“I like how we didn’t give up at the end, we still kept pushing at the end, going hard. We just didn’t have it today.”
The Cougars and Blazers played each other five times in the Okanagan Mainline Amateur Hockey Association and Prince George had a 3-2 edge in the season series. Cats defenceman Brophy Dunne was wishing he could swap one of those league wins for the loss they suffered at the hands of the Blazers Sunday.
“It was really rough to come into our home barn and lose like that – we really wanted to be in the final and carry on and win it and bring it back home for us,” said the 15-year-old Dunne. “Most of our penalties today were good penalties to take, we were out there working our butts off pushing the pace and showing strength and I guess it just didn’t go our way.”
Landon Ingham connected with Sean Meehan and Mathew Magrath to open the scoring on a Cougars’ power play, 5:36 into the game, but before the period ended Ashton Taylor scored on Cougars goalie Dawson Frankforth.
The Blazers were on the power play again to start the second period and Aiden Sutter gave them the lead 40 seconds into the period, followed by another 5-on-4 goal from Stankhoven. Jarrod Semchuk made it 4-1 at even strength before the intermission and Reagan Milburn and Kobe Pavolich added to the count in the third period.
“We came out hard but the bench got down (after Kamloops got its lead) and you have to be up the whole game,” said Cougars forward Brennan Bott, who centred a line with Alex Ochitwa and Kellen Brienen. “The power plays really killed us. It was hard to get the puck out, we had to chip it off the glass to get odd-man rushes on them.
“It was hard to beat (Bateman), he’s a big guy and he’s very physical in the corners.”
The Blazers outshot the Cougars 32-17. Adam Niles picked up the win in the Kamloops nets.
Farr Fabricating started Friday losing 10-4 to the Calgary Northwest Flames, then shut out Hollyburn of North Vancouver 10-0 later that day. On Saturday, the Cougars defeated Calgary Edge 5-4 and beat Langley 6-5 to qualify for the semifinal.
Cougars head coach Mirsad Mujcin was proud of the way his team responded to the pressure of putting together three straight wins to make the playoff round and says there were plenty of positives to draw from what unfolded for his players in their home tournament.
“We came out and got the first goal and the momentum was there but the legs kind of ran out on us and the compete-level dropped and they scored three power-play goals,” said Mujcin. “At this age, it’s hard to keep fighting that adversity and that’s a learning process for these guys. We wanted to be in the finals of our home tournament for sure but our big picture is to compete and be ready for provincials and we’re making strides towards that.
“For the last couple months it’s been hard on our team – we’ve been short a couple players every game and we’ve finally got our team back together and we’re all going. When you start a team at the beginning of the year it’s just a bunch of kids and to get them at the level that we want we have to play these tournaments and we have to lose some games, too, to identify where we are and what we’re about and our roles.”
The Cougars will travel this weekend to Kelowna for three Okanagan Mainline games against the Central-zone Rockets. They’ll be in Abbotsford Feb. 11-13 to try to defend the Dallas Saunders Memorial tournament title they won last season in what will be their final tournament before they head to Kamloops for the Tier 1 provincials, March 19-23.
