LEWISTON – Drake Livada thought it was over. He thought Tom Rich had ended Cape Elizabeth’s game against Lewiston with the winning shot in overtime, and he was about to celebrate, but then he saw the puck sitting in the crease.
Somehow, Lewiston netminder Brian Nason had stretched his bulky left pad across the goalmouth and stopped Rich’s offering on a rebound in front. The puck, however, lay in the blue paint, just outside of the net. Livada reached down tapped the puck across the goal line at 2:29 of overtime to lift the Capers to a 3-2 win over the Blue Devils at the Colisee on Wednesday.
“It went off the goalie’s pads and it kicked out,” said Livada. “Tommy Rich had an effort at it, I thought he was going to put it in, but it just sat there on the goal line.”
The final play left some folks scratching their heads, as the Capers used every inch of the offensive zone — and the goal mouth — to their advantage.
“First of all, I thought it was offside, that was the first thing,” said Lewiston coach Norm Gagne. “Not just a little offside, but a big offside. Then, I thought that the net had come off its mooring. They said it came off after. It was just a judgement call there. There was nothing we could do.”
Regardless of the circumstances, though, the Capers are happy to get back on the winning track.
“We thought about that a lot,” said Cape Elizabeth coach Jason Tremblay. “We had Greely, Lewiston and Leavitt and we said we had to win at least two out of three to have a shot at first place (in Western Class B). We lost to Greely in overtime in kind of a lackluster effort, and that kind of carried over into the first period tonight, but I thought we came out much better in the second, third and overtime.”
Cape finishes up this weekend with a game Saturday against Leavitt. Lewiston plays Cony, and will finish the season at Waterville next Tuesday. The Purple Panthers, who the Blue Devils are chasing for the No. 1 seed in the East, lost Wednesday to Edward Little at Ingersoll Arena, 6-3.
“It was disappointing, too, because I thought it was really a chance for us to take over first place,” said Gagne. “We let it slip away again. We have to win our next two games, and hopefully it will play out and we still have a chance at it.”
More pressing for Gagne, though, was a lack of consistency through the middle part of the game.
“We came out flat in the second, and we got out of sync because of all the penalties,” said Gagne, whose team was whistled for six minors and a major resulting in power plays. “One right after the other, and we had to keep killing them.”
Lewiston was on top before most of the people in the building had even settled into their seats. Travis Lebrun finished a Jon Roy scoring chance after a nice center-zone feed from Jordan Bourgoin freed Roy up the right side. Roy’s shot handcuffed Cape netminder Ryan Hatch and Lebrun swept in through the slot.
Through the rest of the period, the teams bunkered down and became much more physical. Lewiston killed off three straight Cape power plays, including a 21-second 5-on-3 and a double minor.
Lewiston found itself on its first two power play chances of the game shortly thereafter, one of which carried over into the middle frame. Lewiston failed on both chances, though.
Cape then cashed in on a 5-minute major to Roy in the middle of the second. Kyle Dancause bled in from the right point and blasted a slap shot through traffic, beating Nason to knot the score.
The Capers went ahead 2-1, again on the power play, at 14:34 of the second when Griffin Rockwell stuffed a wrister between Nason’s torso and left arm from the right circle.
Brandon Girardin knotted the score early in the third with a nice deflection of a puck in mid-air at the left side of the net on a rebound of a Bourgoin shot.
Comments are no longer available on this story