The Middlebury men's ice hockey team struck first in Friday's NESCAC contest, but Amherst tallied four unanswered goals for a 4-1 victory.
HIGHLIGHTS
- The Mammoths earned a power play with 3:06 expired, but despite peppering Middlebury with six shots, the defense held strong.
- The Panthers took a 1-0 edge with exactly nine minutes off the clock. Jack Silverman blocked an Amherst shot along the right boards, grabbed the rebound and skated into Middlebury's offensive zone. Silverman found Revy Mack in between the circles for a two-on-one. Mack received the pass, faked goalie Connor Leslie to the right and lifted the puck over his right shoulder.
- Amherst responded less than a minute later to make it 1-1. Ben Kuzma dug the puck out from the boards, wrapped around the goal and slipped a backhanded shot past netminder Andrew Heinze.
- The Mammoths took the lead with 5:23 elapsed in the middle frame. Matt Vander-Vort fired a wrister from the top of the right faceoff circle that blasted through traffic and looped into the upper-right corner for the 2-1 advantage.
- Late in the period, Middlebury had a five-on-three for roughly 50 seconds and a four-on-three for another 45 ticks, but Leslie held strong denying a flurry of chances.
- Amherst extended its lead to 3-1 with 21.5 seconds left on the clock. Matt Toporowski sent a pass from the left boards to Bobby Luca who split a pair of defenders to find nylon.
- The Mammoths tacked on a final tally at the 2:53 mark of the third. An Amherst player and a Middlebury defender smacked sticks and the puck squirted out to just inside the blue line above the right circle. Ben Cook was there and one-timed the puck into the upper-left corner for the 4-1 victory.
NOTES
- The programs played for the 94th time with the Panthers owning a 63-24-5 mark in the series.
- Middlebury held a 27-22 edge in faceoff wins.
The Panthers close out first-semester action on Saturday with a 3:00 p.m. puck drop at Hamilton.
