Mentor skates past North Olmsted

The Eagles fought valiantly but it wasn’t enough to get past the Mentor Cardinals on Wednesday night. The Eagles fell 7-4. Chris Lillstrung has the details from the game.

Odds weren’t exactly in North Olmsted’s favor Feb. 6 against Mentor in a Baron Cup I quarterfinal on the venerable ice at Brooklyn. The Eagles were the No. 8 seed, while the Cardinals were No. 1. North Olmsted came in under .500, while Mentor came in looking to set a single-season school record for wins. The Eagles were trounced, 9-2, in the teams’ Red Division crossover Jan. 6. The problem for the Red North East champion Cardinals, though, is North Olmsted didn’t come in assuming anything — and it threw a scare into its foe to be sure as a result. The Eagles held a 3-2 lead late in the opening period and made Mentor earn it, as the Cardinals scored five goals to take some semblance of control and trudge toward a 7-4 victory. North Olmsted standout forward Riley Vertosnik netted a hat trick to earn Monsters player of the game honors, and the Eagles came in hungry with breakouts and oddmans from the puck drop to make life tough on the backcheck for Mentor early. “We were just ready to play,” North Olmsted coach Ben Palocko said. “I’m proud of our guys. It’s kind of a theme that’s happened the last couple of years. The story with North Olmsted is we always have about 10 hockey players that can really skate, so we do our best and we do come out strong a lot. “And we can hang with these teams. It’s just unfortunate that our guys — there’s a lot of times, their brain is still sharp but their body doesn’t follow us all the way to the third. We do what we can, and hope we can keep it close.” Shawn Donovan answered an Evan McBride wrister with a goal at 2:37 of the first to tie it at 1, and Vertosnik lit the lamp at 9:02 to make it a 2-1 game. Kyle Backston threw a wrister on net from the right circle at 10:16 to tie it at 2, but Vertosnik had an answer for that exactly a minute later with a snappy wrister wide at 11:16 for a 3-2 advantage for the Eagles (7-13-2). The potent Cardinals (26-4-2) were struggling to be physical on the backcheck and have a presence in the neutral zone, but did get it to a 3-3 game going into intermission on an an Evan McBride goal at 14:13. Jack Heller scored on a rebound at 1:51 of the second for Mentor, and Jack O’Donnell had a key goal midway through the period to go up, 5-3, as the Cardinals grasped some control. Vertosnik finished off his hat trick with 6:43 left for the final margin. “Our season has kind of been a story of — I was just telling someone else, we just started the year where we were trying to figure some things out, and we got licked pretty good by some teams,” Palocko said. “Since Christmas, we’ve been playing good hockey. We’ve been playing these teams again, for the second time or whatever in the season, and it’s a lot closer. “You do what you can against these teams that are solid and have several lines. So that was kind of our mentality tonight: Look, we’ve been closing the gap on all these teams, so what’s to say we can’t keep this a one-, two-goal game? We had it for a while, and then it got away from us. But yeah, I’m proud of the effort.”