LEWISTON – Edward Little forward Corey Larue never saw the official wave his arms, denying the Red Eddies a goal with 10 minutes remaining in regulation Monday night.
Cony netminder Nick Claudel never controlled the errant shot, however, and the puck was trickling across the goal line behind him.
Larue reached around a defender and poked the puck over the goal line just in case and started waving his own arms in celebration.
“I was just finishing the play,” said Larue. “The first shot, I saw it hit the post and then bounce off the goalie’s skate, then I just put it in.”
Larue’s goal, one of two on the night, was the game-winner as Edward Little (1-1) upended Cony 4-2 in the first and only round of the 2005 Mac’s Grill Tournament at the Colisee.
“Honestly, the team didn’t play too well,” said Edward Little coach Craig Latuscha. “We are a lot better than what we showed out there. We were missing a couple of key ingredients and not putting things together could have cost us the game tonight.”
Cam Robichaud sealed the win at 10:05 of the final frame with a pretty backhand deke to finish off a 2-on-1 with Larue.
“When I put those two together, they obviously clicked a little bit more than when I don’t,” said Latuscha. “I didn’t want to do it unless I needed to.”
On the Cony bench, frustration reigned as the Rams went 0-for-8 on the power play and had little going offensively all night.
“We started out well,” said Cony coach Chad Foye, “but then we stopped doing what we had practiced, started hurrying our decisions. We hurried when we didn’t have to, and we took our time when we had to hurry.”
It was Cony that caught the first break less than five minutes into the game when sophomore defenseman Tade Brooks caught the Edward Little defense in too tight on the power play and banked the puck off the left boards. Waiting for it at center ice was Jake Bansmer, who went in alone on Adam Loudermilk and deked the prone EL netminder to the ice before sliding a backhander in on the right side.
“It was nice for Jake to get that goal,” said Foye. “He did a nice job getting in, getting the goalie moving and tucking it away.”
EL maintained its positional and posessional advantage for the remainder of the period, and a couple of pucks squeezed through Claudel, but none crossed the goal line.
In the second, the teams battled for the better part of eight minutes before Kevin Smith put the Eddies on the board with a laser of a wrist shot from the left circle that beat Claudel high to the glove side. Smith created the chance when he poked the puck past Cony defenseman Zach Logan at center ice.
Cony came back with another to make it 2-1 just 47 seconds later when Ryan Brooks saw his wrist shot, from an angle similar to Smith’s, bounce off Loudermilk’s glove and into the bottom corner of the net, but Corey Larue beat Logan again at 11:07, banking a pass to the front of the net from the left circle off of the embattled Rams’ blueliner and through Claudel’s pads to knot the score at 2-2.
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