It’s often said that beating a team three times in a row is easier said than done.
Ohio found that out the hard-fought way Saturday night, when it needed a Zach Tisdale goal with only 20.7 seconds remaining to break a 4-4 tie and give the Bobcats a three-game sweep over a determined West Virginia squad.
Neither team pulled away in the game.
Ohio took its first lead 7:56 into the third on a Brett Agnew power play goal. But an interference penalty on Tisdale put the Mountaineers on their own man advantage, and the visitors cashed in when Zack LaDuke buried a top-shelf slap shot over Ohio goalie Teddy Dushkin’s right shoulder.
The Bobcats (3-0) rebounded with authority and controlled the last 10 minutes of the game. They got multiple chances on net but were unable to put anything else past West Virginia goaltender Rob Borcky.
“We talked about it on the bench: if they score, how we’re going to handle the bench if they score,” coach Dan Morris said. “When they scored, you could have come on our bench and thought we were up 4-0. The maturity of our team just shined through.”
And the pressure finally paid off with time almost up, Tisdale redeeming himself by taking a pass from Tom Whetsel and sliding the puck past Borcky for the game winner.
“It was one of those where you could see Tizzy was free and it was bouncing to him,” Morris said, “and everybody on the bench is like, ‘If he gets on it, it’s going in the net,’ and he managed to get his stick on it. Guys call him Big Goal Tizzy because he scores big goals.”
While Tisdale was the one to get the goal, Morris said he was impressed with the way multiple players stepped up in the manic last few minutes as Ohio piled on the pressure.
“You could see that last minute and a half we really put it to them,” he said. “Guys wanted to be out there. It was like trying to lasso a wild horse to keep them on the bench.”
Ohio handily beat the Mountaineers 5-2 Friday night and 7-2 Sept. 24 in games drastically different than the Saturday night nail-biter. The Bobcats scored four first-period goals Friday en route to an easy win in which they outshot West Virginia 49-14.
Even with the two comfortable victories, Morris said he had expected a much tougher game Saturday and was happy his third-ranked team got and responded to a tough test early on.
“It’s a challenge, and you want to play in games like this, and you express that to the players that you want to be in those situations,” Morris said. “You don’t want to avoid these situations against good teams or back-and-forth games. You want to thrive in them.”
cd211209@ohiou.edu
