Post by Old Bucks Admin on Apr 30, 2011 19:56:43 GMT -5
Week 23 will go down in club lore as the “Thrilla in L’villa”. Red called it the best game of the year; Blue not so much. Blue had Dan Dougherty between the pipes whose rage at anything red comes as naturally to him as a bull’s. Pitted against Dan was Marty, three times his age, but four times as determined to win. On paper the teams looked balanced; on the ice too, at least for the first 20 minutes during which no one scored. Blue drew first blood when Brian Urban got a small patch of net in his cross-hairs and plugged it good. At two-zip Blue had going what they like to call Joe-mentum which is any offensive surge involving Joe Peugot. Eddie made it 2-1 but Blue shrugged it off, extending their lead to 4-1 in no time with Rich Cerbone and Rich Devlin providing the fireworks. From Red’s perspective the game was at its crisis and tempers flared. Marty even took to task Bill MacDowell for not covering Bob Freiling more closely, but it was Bill’s only lapse in an otherwise standout performance. The tide turned when Jim Heffern sifted a shot through a tangled screen of bodies and found the net, reducing the lead to 4-2. He then ran a give-and-go with Greg Wright that was simply to die for, making the score 4-3. Moments later Greg Wright redirected a missile off the stick of Dave Major to tie the game at four. Blue was in effect collapsing; their offensive surge Joe-ver. They regained the lead only to relinquish it again. Three more goals from John Lupisella, Greg Wright, and Jim Heffern made the score 7-5 Red. At 7-6, with the zamboni door about to open, Kevin Saunders cut loose with the puck and got a dreamed-for breakaway to tie the game. He tried to jimmy open Marty’s five hole with a head feint right but the wily netminder stuffed him good and saved the day. Afterward the locker room scuttlebutt was all about Mike Dougherty’s “ONE SKATE ON, ONE SKATE OFF!” outburst following an off-sides call by Red. It was emblematically hilarious—the perfect byword for what was, indeed, a perfect hockey game.