A gold (quick) strike
NA wins 3A title with 3-0 victory
Early onslaught lifts Montour to PIHL Class 1A hockey championship.
Tri-State Sports & News Service
South Fayette is one of the few teams in Class 1A with the speed and firepower to get into a run-and-gun game with Montour and stay with the Spartans stride for stride.
That philosophy might have worked for the Lions had they not given the Spartans such a huge head start.
Michael Felsing, Richard Froelich and Dustin Geregach staked Montour (21-1-0) to a three-goal lead early in the second period and goalie Zach O’Malley made it stand up with 23 saves as the top-seeded Spartans earned a 6-3 win over South Fayette (19-3-0) in the PIHL Class 1A Penguins Cup final at UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex for the school’s first championship.
“I’m crying, and you can see I’m pretty happy,” Montour coach Clay Shell said. “It’s awesome. I got that feeling when I was helping with Peters [Township], but the boys were just awesome and this was a fantastic year.”
Shell was not forgotten by his friends at Peters Township. The Indians were scheduled to play North Allegheny in the Class 3A final immediately after the Spartans win, and their staff, led by head coach Rick Tingle, came over and congratulated their former assistant as soon as he left the ice.
Montour will play fivetime defending Pennsylvania Cup champion West Chester Bayard Rustin for the state title at 11 a.m. Saturday at Island Sports Complex. Preparing to play the Knights will be akin to how they got set up for South Fayette as the two teams never played this season until the Penguins Cup final.
“We studied film on them and we knew that they were very good defensively and had allowed the fewest goals [29 in 21 previous games] in our class,” Shell said.
Montour wasted no time jumping on them as Felsing opened with an unassisted goal at 6:02 and Froelich scored the first of his two at 11:01 to stake the Spartans to a 2-0 lead. Just 1:51 into the third, Geregach scored and, all of a sudden, the Spartans had a three-goal lead.
South Fayette had not allowed more than four goals in a regular-season game and had given up just three in its first three playoff games.
Class 3A
North Allegheny’s Aaron Miller scored on a 2-on-0 breakaway 37 seconds into the second period for the only goal the Tigers needed and capped it with an emptynetter with 58.7 remaining in regulation as the Tigers won their first Class 3A Penguins Cup title since 2013 with a 3-0 victory against Peters Township.
“When I scored that [first] goal and turned around and saw that student section up there, that’s why we won this game,” Miller said. “We had the support of the people behind me.”
North Allegheny, which allowed the fewest goals in the classification this season, showed why as goaltender Richard Karapandi was at times solid and at others spectacular as he stopped all 23 shots he faced to pick up the shutout. In three playoff games, Karapandi gave up three goals, has a 0.87 goalsagainst average and has stopped 103 of 106 (.972 save percentage) shots he has faced.
It was the first time Peters Township has been shut out since North Allegheny defeated the Indians, 2-0, in the 2013 Penguins Cup final, a span of 134 games.