North Haven stays perfect, tops Woodstock

NORTH BRANFORD — The high-powered offense got on the board first Wednesday, and in a battle of two teams that hadn’t faced a whole lot of adversity in the boys hockey season’s first month, here was a little bit for North Haven.

But after that Woodstock Academy short-handed goal in the first period, No. 9 North Haven struck back quickly, quieted the Centaurs’ offense and went on to a 5-1 win at Northford Ice Pavilion.

“We just wanted to generate momentum after the goal,” said Alex Petersen, who scored the Nighthawks’ first goal and added another. “I guess that’s what we did, and it carried the rest of the game.”

North Haven, ranked ninth in the GameTimeCT Top 10 Poll this week, has allowed 10 goals in its first seven games, all wins. The Division-II Nighthawks have two wins against Division I teams.

And Woodstock Academy (7-1-0), the top votegetter outside the top 10, had scored 54 goals in its first seven games. So when the Centaurs struck on

Maxx Corradi’s short-handed goal 9:20 in, it might’ve opened the floodgates. It didn’t: North Haven held them to 16 shots.

“We preach being stingy,” said Nighthawks coach Chris Avena, whose team went to the Division II final last year. “We really enjoy being very hard to score against. We take that very seriously. We work at it in practice.

“To take a team of that nature, that scores as many goals as they do and hold them to one where your player fell down, we’ll take that.”

Petersen scored just over two minutes after Corradi’s goal, a bad-angle shot from the bottom of the right circle for the right-handed shot.

“It just bounced off the back wall,” Petersen said. “The net was open. I just turned and shot it.”

Tommy Guidone got a backhander in the slot to go in a bit over a minute later, and North Haven had all it needed.

Woodstock coach Mark Smolak said the Centaurs hadn’t trailed at the end of a period in their first seven games. They hadn’t really seen that kind of pushback.

“As the game went on, maybe because we hadn’t played from behind, I think maybe we started to grip the sticks a bit too tightly,” Smolak said.

“It’s early in the season. We have a huge, difficult part of the season coming up,” starting with Rhode Island’s Bishop Hendricken on Saturday at Pomfret. “Hopefully the takeaway from this is that we have to be ready from puck-drop and continue that momentum throughout the game.”

Guidone and Petersen had three points apiece. Owen Quick and Bryce Mastriano scored in the third period.

PLAYER OF THE GAME

North Haven senior forward Alex Petersen scored a quick tying goal after Woodstock Academy took the lead and added another in the second period. He also had an assist.

TWO PETERSENS

It took a moment for Avena to come up with a player who may have surprised him through the first third of the regular season. That’s partly because he expected goalie Bryce Petersen, Alex’s brother, to be good, just perhaps not to the level at which he has played.

“All he’s done is — I think he’s 15-0 as a starter,” Avena said, “and coming from being behind (standout goalies Andrew) Sacco and ( Jared) Anderson, how fortunate are we as a program to now have, potentially, another all-stater? He’s certainly looking that way in the beginning. When we’ve needed him early in the season to make big saves, he’s been there.”

QUOTABLE

“We’ve been struggling a little bit to try to find our identity as a team. It’s nice to come out there and demonstrate who we are.”

—North Haven coach Chris Avena