After toying with the Norfolk Admirals for the first 20 minutes of the game, falling behind 3-2 in the process, the Hershey Bears decided to get down and dirty and work for what they wanted, scraping out a 6-4 win on Saturday night at Giant Center.
The Bears, whose only two regulation wins of the month prior to this evening occurred on the road, ended February on a good note, registering their first regulation home ice victory since their triumph over Norfolk on January 31st.
The first goal of the game came from an unlikely source, when Hershey’s Grant McNeill, better known for the damage that he is capable of in the fisticuffs department, showed soft hands by deftly deflecting Patrick McNeill’s point shot behind Norfolk goaltender, Craig Kowalski, at to give the Bears the lead at 7:17.
“I got a little lucky,” said Grant McNeill, whose goal marked his first of the season. “Me and Osala drove the net hard and I think that’s the key against most teams if you get traffic. I got lucky it hit my stick and I finally got a goal this year.”
McNeill’s goal wasn’t the only contribution he made to his teams’ success, as he single-handedly took on three different Admirals, earning 25 PIM’s, including a game misconduct.
“There’s a time and a place for what I do and obviously when you’re down you’ve got to go and keep guys in check,” said McNeill. “We’ve got an extremely skilled team and I think I view it as my role to protect the boys and make sure they can do all their jobs.”
Bears’ Darren Reid and Alexandre Giroux took minor penalties just 46 seconds apart, paving the way for Brandon Bochenski’s 5-on-3 power play goal at 12:25, tying the game at one.
Norfolk’s Paul Szczechura made it a 2-1 game when he blew by defenseman, Karl Alzner, who stumbled on the blue line, and then wristed a shot behind Bears’ netminder, Daren Machesney.
Kowalski contributed to his own demise when he played what would have been an icing infraction, keeping the play alive and allowing the Bears to eventually tie the game with a goal from Graham Mink at 17:25.
“Lepisto fed Aucoin. He (Aucoin) is such a good passer, you just make yourself available and he’ll thread the needle,” Mink said. “The first shot, the goalie stopped, but he was going across too much and enabled me to have pretty much an empty net to throw the backhander in.”
With under ten seconds to play in the first period, Bochenski netted his second 5-on-3 goal of the period, beating Machesney with a high wrist shot that gave his team the lead to take to the locker room.
Zenon Konopka’s soft goal opened the second period scoring when his seemingly harmless shot eluded the grasp of Machesney, and sent a murmur throughout the crowd. Hershey head coach, Bob Woods, who had made three in-game goaltending changes in each of the last three games, said that making it four in a row was not an option.
“I told him (Machesney) before the game this morning, I said ‘I’m not pulling you; I don’t care what happens. Just go out there and don’t worry about being pulled. Just go out and play the game’. I thought he made some big saves,” said Woods of Machesney, who stopped the subsequent 18 shots he faced after the Konopka goal.
Machesney said that his pre-game pep talk didn’t factor into his performance.
“I didn’t think about it too much. As a goaltender, when you’re going through rough times, you just have to fight and find a way to get through. The only way to do it is to battle through it. You can’t expect to show up the next day and it’s going to be fine again.”
Osala’s 20th goal of the year at 17:48 cut the Bears’ deficit to one goal.
“It may have looked nice, but I actually fanned on the shot,” said Osala, whose goal broke a 17-game goal-scoring drought. “I’ve been through droughts before, so I knew it was going to come, but this is probably the longest I’ve ever been in. Of course you start to doubt yourself. It’s hard to explain how you feel when first, everything is going in, but then no matter what you do, nothing goes in. It was a rough stretch for me. The way I got out of it was by working hard.”
After the newly formed line of Mink, Osala, and Keith Aucoin established a prolonged presence in the Ads’ zone, Mink’s second goal of the game at 16:57 tied the game at four.
“We had a really good forecheck going that shift,” said Mink. “We were working really hard and had some chances. It was kind of the end of shift when Lepisto came down the wall and made a great play to bring it to the net. I just went to the front of the net and it came to my stick. To have a wide open net like that, with the puck on your stick is a really great feeling.”
Riding the wave of Mink’s goal, the Bears struck again just 28 seconds later when Matthieu Perreault scored what eventually proved to be the game-winner.
“It was a good play by Sloan to throw it at the net,” said Perreault, who also scored the game-winning goal in the January 31st triumph. “The puck was up in the air and I just gave a swing and it hit the shaft of my stick and went in.”
In an effort to tie the game in the last minute, Norfolk pulled Kowalski for an extra attacker; however, their efforts were foiled when Bears’ Chris Bourque was awarded an empty net goal at 19:46 after being hauled by Bochenski.
The Bears, picking up their 38th win of the season, were awarded two points for their much-improved work ethic.
“It was a good win for us,” said Mink, the night’s number one star. “It was a character win to come back late in the third like that, and we want to use that momentum to carry us into March.”