ANNVILLE -- No matter how many times you get there, the feeling never gets old.
Nick Shenberger’s deflection of Luk Devorski’s point shot with 1:10 to play in overtime sent defending champion Hershey back to the Bears Cup championship game with a high-wire 3-2 win over Dallastown at Klick-Lewis Arena.
The Trojans will play for their 13th Bears Cup – better than two-thirds of all the top flight titles won in the CPIHL’s 19-year history – on March 1 at Hersheypark Arena against Monday’s winner of Dallastown/Elizabethtown at York. The Bears stunned regular season champ Cumberland Valley 5-3 Friday night at Twin Ponds West to eliminate the Eagles from the Tier I tournament.
“As far I’m concerned, that’s what the playoffs are all about,” Hershey head coach Jarrod Hill said. “It was a hard-fought game on both sides. Dallastown, that’s probably the hardest anybody’s played us all year long. They work to their strengths. They like to play these low-scoring hockey games, clog up the neutral zone. They take a lot away from you. You have to keep grinding and stick with the game plan.”
With the two teams 70 seconds away from a shootout, Shenberger’s deflection game-winner -- coming on the power play -- beat Dallastown goalie Wyatt Malone high to the right corner of the net and sent the Trojans’ bench mob streaming onto the ice in a state of delirium.
Delirium was not Shenberger’s reflex thought after seeing the puck hit twine.
“Relief,” he countered. “I was just happy we didn’t have to go to the shootout. We played hard and came out with the win. That’s what I like to see.”
The Trojans went to the power play when Dallastown’s Nick Warner was called for tripping with 1:37 left in the OT session. Devorski manned the point on the ensuing power play. He sent the puck at the net through a sea of skates, looking for a deflection.
“Coach says to send the puck to the net and good things happen,” Devorski said. “I saw Shenberger at the net and tried for the deflection.”
Shenberger opened the scoring at 6:39 of the first period on a little wraparound behind Malone that the Wildcats’ big goalie never saw, having eluded his skates.
But D-Town relentlessly hounded the Trojans on the puck, using effective stick work to force turnovers and heap the kind of pressure it takes to beat the kind of offensive talent Hershey brings to the ice.
That hounding paid off midway through the second period, when a turnover in Hershey’s defensive zone rolled to the right sideboards and found the stick of Bailey Haines, who streamed in from the wing and beat Trojans goalie Mark Croxall at 6:07 of the second to tie it at 1-all.
Jake Mitchell gave D-Town a 2-1 lead just 1:41 later on a rebound putback.
The lead held up for nearly a full period of hard-fought hockey, until Devorski tied it back up with 9:06 to go in regulation, on the power play, with a rebound off a shot in the slot from Adam Hrabovsky.
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