Down by four goals heading into the third period, the L/A Fighting Spirit mounted a comeback on Saturday afternoon, but just fell short.
The Cape Cod Islanders won Game 2 of the North American 3 Eastern Hockey League’s Eastern Divisional Final, 5-3, at Falmouth Ice Arena in Falmouth, Mass., to sweep the best-of-three series.
With the loss, the inaugural season in Lewiston comes to an end for the Fighting Spirit.
“The last four years, it’s the first time we are done this early,” L/A Fighting Spirit coach Rod Simmons said. “We normally make it to the finals. This is the first time in four years we aren’t going into the championship.”
L/A’s furious comeback was sparked by two goals in a 40-second span.
Austin Davis got the Spirit on the board 3:53 into the third. Mike Heffernan notched the lone assist.
Clay Janowiak cut the deficit in half when he notched the second Fighting Spirit goal. David Fish and Linder Kenyon set it up.
Just past the midway point of the third period, Brett Bittner pulled L/A within one. Colby Siering tallied the helper.
“We jumped off that and we added another one,” Simmons said of the Davis goal. “We had a few opportunities on the power play and hit a post. It was a little too late, that’s all.”
The Fighting Spirit had a power play with 5:43 remaining in the game.
Dan Moore who opened the scoring for the Islanders in the first period notched his second goal of the game on an empty-netter with 29 seconds remaining in the game.
After Moore made it 1-0 only 47 seconds into the game, Maxime Dordet stretched the lead to 2-0 for the Islanders two minutes later on the power play.
Cape Cod was 1-for-8 on the man advantage, while the Fighting Spirit were 0-for-4.
“It definitely took the steam out of us coming in,” Simmons said of the two early goals. “We had good emotion coming in and we were pretty level. It was a couple of fluke goals that happened.
“The fans came down. We had about 50 people who showed up on the bus. They were all clapping for the guys coming out. We had a lot of fans in the stands, when you get bounces like that, it’s tough.”
Cape Cod went into the intermission with a 3-0 lead after Mark Jessman scored 11:28 into the period.
Aaron Deady made it 4-0 midway through the second period.
Steven Schmitt made 31 saves in the victory. Claes Endre stopped 40 shots for L/A.
Cape Cod will take on the winner of the Western Division Champion next weekend for the NA3EHL Championship. The New York Aviators lead the New Jersey Wildcats 1-0 in that series.
nfournier@sunjournal.com
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