Things didn’t start well, but they certainly ended well for the Maine Black Bears on Friday night. Jakob Sirota scored his second goal of the night with less than two minutes left in the third period to tie the game, and David Breazeale scored on a breakaway with 41.8 seconds left in overtime for a 6-5 victory over Merrimack College in men’s Hockey East action at the Alfond Arena in Orono. The win is the first of the season, and the first under new head coach Ben Barr.
Merrimack (4-7-0, 2-6-0 Hockey East) dominated the first period. Alex Jefferies scored 52 seconds in, and Filip Karlsson-Tagtstrom tallied 2:06 later for a 2-0 Warriors lead. Sirota scored his first of the night on an assist from Jacob Schmidt-Svestrup at 8:02 to put Maine on the board, but Max Newton made it 3-1 at 19:03. MC had a 15-1 shots on goal advantage through the first 20 minutes. The Black Bears turned it on in the second thanks to their powerplay. Grant Hebert cut it to 3-2 with the extra man at 1:42, and then at 9:09 Lynden Breen made it 3-3 with another powerplay goal with assists from Ben Poisson and Breazeale. Schmidt-Svestrup gave the hosts the lead 4-3 when he poked a shot by Cam Spicer through the legs of Merrimack goalie Hugo Ollas exactly a minute later. A powerplay goal by Newton 31 seconds into the third period made it 4-4, before Filip Forsmark scored to restore the lead for the guests 5-4 at 16:13. Sirota would send the game to overtime with a wrist shot through traffic from the bottom of the left faceoff circle with 1:27 to go. Breazeale send the home crowd home happy when he picked up a loose puck at the MC blue line in the extra session, skated in alone and went top shelf on Ollas to end it.
Victor Ostman made 27 saves in net in the Maine win. Breazeale and Breen both had one goal and two assists, Sirota had two goals, Schmidt-Svestrup had one goal and one assist, and Poisson added two assists to lead the way for the Black Bears. Newton had two goals, Forsmark had a goal and an assist, and both Zach Uens and Steven Jandric had a pair of assists in the loss for Merrimack. Ollas made 26 saves. The Black Bears are now 1-7-1, 1-4-0 in Hockey East. The teams finish off the two game weekend series on Saturday at 5 p.m.
