Saints settle for three point weekend after 2-2 tie with Brown

Oh those pesky Bears...

Brown's hockey team assured itself of at least one point from the Saints for the 18th consecutive season, using a pair of power play goals and the goaltending of junior Dan Rosen to forge a 2-2 overtime tie at Appleton Arena Saturday evening.

The Saints, who twice had one-goal leads, did keep a five game unbeaten streak alive and gained three of a possible four points on the opening weekend of ECAC play. SLU will take a 4-2-1 overall mark and a 1-0-1 ECAC record into its first league road trip of the year, games at Dartmouth and Harvard next weekend. The Saints cracked the top 20 nationally for the first time this season on Monday, checking in at 19th in the USCHO/CBS College Sports poll.

"Brown works very hard and they have a terrific goaltender," said Saint coach Joe Marsh. "They took advantage of their opportunities on the power play, and if Alex Petizian hadn't had another strong game, it was a game we might have lost. I thought we had very good intensity and worked hard, but we definitely need to cut down on our penalties."

The Saints went into Saturday's game leading the nation in penalty killing and had killed off 25 consecutive opponent power plays, but Brown scored both of its goals with the man advantage, going two for seven for the night.

The Saints jumped out to a 1-0 lead at 6:54 of the first period when senior Kevin DeVergilio picked up a rebound and snapped a wrist shot past Rosen for his second of the year. Rookie Jacob Drewiske started the scoring play when he took the puck from defenseman Jeff Caister and snapped a hard shot on goal which Rosen was able to stop, but the Brown goalie could not control the rebound.

Brown came back to tie it just 15 seconds into its first power play opportunity of the night as rookie defenseman Jeff Buvinov snapped a shot through traffic from the center slot which eluded a screened Petizian at 8:15.

St. Lawrence had to adjust its lines early in the game when sparkplug center Travis Vermeulen was injured when he was taken down in front of the net as he tried to shoot. The Saints also played without captain Jared Ross who sat out the game after sustaining an injury in Friday's 3-2 overtime win over Yale.

The Saints regained the lead with a five-on-three power play goal with just 29 seconds to go in the second period. Caister worked the puck from the point to Augie DiMarzo at the top of the faceoff circle and DiMarzo dropped it back to Shawn Fensel, who hit nothing but net from the center slot for his first of the year to make it a 2-1 game.

Brown got a five-on-three of its own which included a full two minutes within a major power play and while the Saints nearly killed off the two-man advantage, Sean McMonagle scored the eventual game-tying goal with 6:27 to go in regulation, putting back a rebound from point blank range.

The Saints, who hit a number of posts in the game, had what looked to be the game winner in the final seconds of regulation when Rosen got a piece of a shot by Mike McKenzie and the puck flipped up in the air and bounced off his back. Officials ruled it never crossed the goal line, however, and the two teams went into overtime.

McKenzie had another shot clang off the post in overtime, but both Rosen and Petizian prevented further scoring, Petizian making three of his 27 saves in the overtime. Rosen finished with 35 stops for Brown.