The Melfort Mustangs made it a game late in Flin Flon, but couldn’t quite finish off the comeback against the Bombers in the back half of their Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League (SJHL) season opening home-and-home.
The Mustangs were down 4-1 with about seven minutes to play in the third, but brought it back to 4-3 with about a minute to play before an empty netter sealed the 5-3 win for the Bombers. The Mustangs were short a few bodies in the lineup, and Assistant Coach Trevor Logan said they needed to keep things simple.
“I don’t know if we kept it as simple as we could of at times, tried to do too many things at times,” Logan said. “But other than that, we kept battling, so I was very happy with that.”
Liam McInnis scored with 4.1 seconds left in the third for the Mustangs, but in the second, the Bombers came back firing, in part thanks to five total powerplay chances. Nathan Gagne, and Jaxon Martens scored for Flin Flon to flip the script. The Bombers kept it going into the third as Cole Duperreault scored twice to make it 4-1.
The Mustangs did battle back though with two powerplay goals from Curtis Hammond in the last four minutes of the game. Melfort seemed to have all the momentum and might have been on their way to overtime, that was until Mason Kaspick fired one into the empty net to finish this one-off.
The Bombers outshot the Mustangs 44-39 in the end, with Melfort netminder Steven Bacovsky stopping 39 of 43 that he saw.
“Steven battled hard,” Logan said. “There was a lot of mass confusion at times it seemed in our own end. The guys held on and it is what it is. [Trevor] Blevins and I were very happy with the way the boys pushed until the end to make a game out if it, no quit, and we’ll just take that, put it in our back pocket, go home and go to work.”
The 1-1-0-0 Mustangs will head to Yorkton on Tuesday, Sep. 28 for a meeting with the Terriers. You can hear that game on 105 CJVR with Mat Barrett’s pre-game show starting at 7:15 p.m.
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mat.barrett@melfortmustangs.com
On Twitter: @matbarrett6
