Dream Season Ends For Pattonville Hockey With Playoff Loss To SLUH

WEBSTER GROVES – The best season in the history of hockey ended Tuesday night, when the Pirates were eliminated from the first round of the Mid-States Hockey Association Challenge Cup playoffs by the No. 2-ranked team in the area, the SLUH Jr. Billikens.

Pattonville, which was surprisingly named the No. 15 seed in the Challenge Cup playoffs, despite winning the Suburban North Conference and posting an area-best 25-2-1 record this season, lost Game 1 against SLUH 8-1 last Friday.

That meant the Pirates would have to win twice on Tuesday, if they were going to somehow advance to the second round.

“We were really surprised (by the seeding),” Pattonville head hockey coach Randy Guenther said. “I know we didn’t play in that good of a division. But we won a lot of games and had a great year. I thought we deserved a little better spot. We probably could’ve got a little further.”

The only way Pattonville was going to advance on Tuesday, was if it beat SLUH twice.

The Pirates needed to win Game 2 at the Webster Groves Ice Rink, then win again in a Game 3 mini-game, which would’ve followed immediately after.

Unfortunately, SLUH scored three times in an exhausting third period to pull out a 5-2 win over the Pirates, which clinched the series victory for the Jr. Bills and ended Pattonville’s season.

“We’ve got guys that can play, but we just didn’t have the horses to stay with a team like that,” Guenther said. “They’ve got so many guys that play (select and elite club hockey), and we just (couldn’t match) that.”

But they almost did.

SLUH jumped out to a 2-0 lead on a pair of first-period goals by senior Daniel Warnecke and junior Stephen Lordo, and seemed primed to make Game 2 the same kind of blowout that Game 1 was.

But Pattonville answered with quite possibly its best period of the season, which was capped by unlikely goals by senior defensemen Korey Null and Trace Jablin.

Pirate leading scorer Joey Kavanaugh assisted on both goals, and suddenly Pattonville had new life with a tie score heading into the third period.

But as Guenther feared, the Pirates couldn’t hang on in the third.

SLUH’s Warnecke scored twice more for the Jr. Bills in the third period, including a breakaway wrister with 5:55 left, that proved to be the game-winner.

The Jr. Bills won the series 2 games to none, and will now advance to the Challenge Cup quarterfinals, where they’ll face Marquette High in the second round, after the tenth-seeded Mustangs upset seventh-seed Rockwood Summit 2 games to 1.

Pattonville finished its year with a 25-4-1 record – the best mark in school history – and saw several players have remarkable seasons, including Kavanaugh, who led the team with 48 goals and 32 assists, and teammate Logan Harnetz, who had 34 goals and 20 assists this year.

“I just told them I was proud of them,” Guenther said. “The way they played this year, and the way they worked, I’m just so proud of the heart these young men showed this year.”