Heartbreaking end for Quinnipiac in tourney
Minnesota State’s Brendan Furry had circled with the puck, sliced to the net and, suddenly, there was Reggie Lutz hacking away at the side of Keith Petruzzelli’s crease. The Quinnipiac goalie couldn’t see the puck, but he must have thought he had it covered.
He did not.
Ryan Sandelin, whose dad, Scott, coaches Minnesota Duluth and whose own coach Mike Hastings says Ryan has been around hockey since he “came out of the womb,” knows better than anyone how NCAA Tournament
overtime can end in a heartbeat. Sandelin didn’t need to overthink it Saturday night at Budweiser Events Center. He buried the loose puck in the Bobcats’ net 11:13 into the extra session.
Petruzzelli did see what happened next. He stood there and watched as the Minnesota State players gathered in a delirious mob to celebrate their 4-3 triumph that sent them into the West Regional final against Minnesota and ended Quinnipiac’s season.
Petruzzelli, one of Quinnipiac’s two senior Hobey Baker finalists, then dropped to his knees, head down. His teammate Jayden Lee came to console him.
Farther up ice, the program’s other Hobey Baker finalist, senior captain Odeen Tufto, also had dropped to his knees. The
Bobcats’ 5-foot-7 giant had scored the game’s first goal on a rebound, led the nation in assists, played every other shift in the late going. And now Joey Cipollone and Marcus Chorney were doing their best to comfort their exhausted leader.
It was a heartbreaking end.
“These last two games have been pretty tough,” Tufto said. “Obviously losing that way to St. Lawrence for the (ECAC) championship and tonight ending my college career, it sucks.”
The better team doesn’t always win in hockey. Goaltending, the referee’s whistle, the fickle bounce of a vulcanized rubber disc on ice always can conspire against superiority. As the game wore on, Minnesota State was the better team, one Quinnipiac coach Rand Pecknold called among the top five in the nation. Yet there was his defenseman CJ McGee closing from the left point to unleash a dart behind Mavericks goalie Dryden McKay with 11:06 left in regulation to give the Bobcats a 3-1 lead. It looked awfully good for Quinnipiac and the students gathered in Hamden to watch on the big screen at the school’s field hockey stadium.
That goal was the first of the sophomore defenseman’s college career. It was, in fact, McGee’s first point of the season, a huge one worth every inch of the joyous conga line of high fives along the bench. Playoff hockey is often filled with unlikely heroes and here was the native of Pearl River, New York, not far from the Tappan Zee Bridge, looking golden even after Nathan Smith sliced the lead to 3-2 with 5:06 left.
Three of the 10 Hobey Baker finalists — given to the premier player in college hockey — played in this game. McKay was the third. His dad, Ross, was one of those rare figures in sports who gets that one sip of coffee in the majors, never to appear again. He played the final 35 minutes of a 6-1 Whalers loss in a March 17, 1991, game at Buffalo. Kay Whitmore wasn’t playing badly, but coach Rick Ley decided he’d pull a Mike Keenan and pull him anyway. Whitmore slammed his stick against the boards as he left. Like Whitmore, McKay stopped 12 of 15 shots that night. I covered that game at the Aud.
At any rate, Peter Sidorkiewicz returned from injury, and Ross McKay? He became a chiropractor in the Chicago area and, yes, his son is named in honor of the goaltending Hall of Famer. McKay and his wife were initially going to name him Dylan, but Dylan McKay was Luke Perry’s character in “Beverly Hills, 90210.” So they went with Dryden — which may be the longest way possible to say he was pulled for another attacker in the final two minutes.
With icing waved off, Jake Livingstone retrieved the puck, went coast to coast, dodging three Bobcats, going wide of a fourth and backhanding a pass to Cade Borchardt for a devastating conversion to tie the game with 62 seconds left. Overtime.
The Bobcats had started poorly against St. Lawrence last weekend in the ECAC championship, coming on strong in the second period only to allow the tying goal in the closing minutes and lose in overtime. Pecknold said he did a “little something different” Saturday to ignite a fast start and it worked, with early goals by Tufto and Peter DiLiberatore off tic-tac-toe passing on a 3-on-2 break.
“I think we shocked them a little bit,” Tufto said.
“Wasn’t looking good is an understatement,” Hastings said. “I just said, ‘Fellas, let’s push all the chips in and just play.”
Momentum shifted in the middle period, although Petruzzelli, who finished with 34 saves, kept the Mavericks without a goal until Jake Jaremko scored with 1:51 left in the second.
“They found their legs, had a lot of heavy shifts,” Tufto said. “Keith was stout. He was keeping us in it.”
The Bobcats were outshot 7-2 in overtime. A strength with Tufto, Quinnipiac was beaten on faceoffs, 26-10, after the second period. The Mavericks were controlling possession and pace. You could feel something bad coming. And it did.
“I don’t want to say we’re a young team, but unfortunately we’re a little all over the map at times,” Pecknold said. “You can’t do that against a top-five team nationally.”
The Mavericks had never won an NCAA Tournament game. They were 0-6, so this night meant plenty to their program. The Bobcats advanced to the national title game in 2013 and ’16. This team filled with underclassmen was ranked 10th in the nation, yet it wasn’t easy to say exactly how good it was. Beyond Bowling Green, there were few measuring sticks. COVID saw several cancellations, and two-thirds of the ECAC schools called off their season. Most of the schedule was against only three teams.
None of that takes away from the career contributions of Tufto and Petruzzelli. They will not be easy to replace. Tufto leaves as the school’s all-time assist leader and one shy of Quinnipiac’s Division I record of 169 points. Petruzzelli had a 1.89 GAA this season with a .926 save percentage, 2.17 and .915 along with 10 shutouts for his career.
“Two great players,” Pecknold said. “It has been fun to watch Odeen develop since his freshman year when he was all offense. I got on him, got on him, trying to get him to play defense and work on his faceoffs. He has become a better athlete, a better skater. Keith has had a four-year progression. Those two guys carried us this year.”
“I was given a great opportunity when I came as a freshman to play big minutes right away and play special teams,” Tufto said. “Rand Pecknold has given me the world. I don’t know where I’d be today without Rand, the coaching staff and the opportunities they gave me.”
Petruzzelli’s future is in the Red Wings organization. Tufto, undrafted, will field free-agent possibilities. Before they left the ice, the two found the other two Bobcats seniors, Joe O’Connor and Josh Mayanja, and they embraced.
What Odeen Tufto will not get the chance to do is play against Minnesota, a team he idolized growing up in the Twin Cities. There will be no Frozen Four his year.