The cardiac crew came through. Again.
Locked in a 3-3 battle in Stettler, Cochrane Generals rookie forward Kurt Thrussel was the only shooter to score in Cochrane’s 4-3 overtime shootout victory Oct. 4 over the Lightning.
Extra-time heroics define the Generals early in this Heritage Junior Hockey League season.
“Including preseason, we’ve played nine games,” Generals head coach Evan McFeeters recounted, wary of the growing number of grey hairs on his 27-year-old head. “Seven have been either overtime of one-goal hockey games.”
The win in Stettler salvaged a road-trip weekend in which the Gens were tripped 6-4 by Banff Bears on Oct. 3.
“It was a so-so weekend. That’s how I’d put it,” McFeeters assessed. “We’ve kind of struggled with Banff over the last year. I thought we carried the play for 40 minutes but let our foot off the gas in the second period. It’s kind of become a pattern early in the season that we have to get over. We let a team hang around for way too long and it came around to bite us in the butt.”
Talus Hume, Austin Keller, Corey Goeson and Patrick Dove scored for Cochrane in Banff.
McFeeters rallied the troops prior to the Oct. 4 Stettler tilt, pumping them full of enough ammunition to win the battle in an extra-time shootout.
“We had a team meeting before. We were focussed on what we had to do. We needed to get two points on the road to salvage the weekend. We went in there and it was a tight game like it always is. Kurt Thrussel buried a big goal for us in the shootout.”
Goeson (2) and Sayer McDonald also scored for Cochrane in Stettler. Mack Chalmers kicked out 35 shots in the Generals goal, stopping all Stettler shooters in the shootout.
