MOON TOWNSHIP, Pa. — It was a night of comebacks at 84 Lumber Arena Friday night as Robert Morris and Sacred Heart engaged in a spirited, back-and-forth battle that took more than regulation to decide.
Zac Lynch delivered the knockout blow just 25 seconds into overtime to give the Colonials the hard-fought 5-4 conference victory.
“Tonight, I’m not sure we deserved what we got,” Robert Morris coach Derek Schooley said. “We didn’t play the game the right way. We respected Sacred Heart, but we didn’t respect the game and the way to play. We found a way to win, [and] good teams do that, but we had a lot of holes in our game tonight. We shouldn’t be fooled by winning. If we really evaluate our game, we weren’t that good and give Sacred Heart a lot of credit. They pressed the issue worked hard and capitalized on their chances.”
From the drop of the puck, the scoring chances were plentiful for both teams as fans were treated to a wide-open game. The Pioneers found themselves with early odd-man rushes which they couldn’t get past RMU netminder Terry Shafer, but it was the Colonials who capitalized on their best chances early on as Daniel Leavens opened the scoring at the 5:30 mark when he buried a pass from David Friedmann for his third goal of the season.
Jeff Jones then put the Colonials ahead by a pair at 9:38 when he beat Pioneers’ goaltender Andrew Bodnarchuk from close range with assists coming via David Rigatti and Spencer Dorowicz.
Despite being down two goals at the end of 20 minutes, the Pioneers stuck to their game plan and the patience was rewarded.
Sacred Heart opened the second period as if they’d been shot out of a cannon and tilted the ice in the Colonials’ end for large stretches. The Pioneers cut the Robert Morris lead in half just 35 ticks into the middle frame when while on the power play, Erlich Doerksen sent a hard slap shot to the top corner for his second goal of the season.
Sacred Heart didn’t wait for a response as it applied pressure in the RMU end relentlessly.
Zach Sabitini tied the game just a few moments later when he took a pass from Kory Kennedy that he put past Shafer at 4:55. The Pioneers weren’t finished with their scoring frenzy as Ben Lake scored his team-leading fifth goal of the year on a backhander from the slot into the cage at 12:31 to give the Pioneers a 3-2 lead.
Following the Lake goal, the Colonials found a way to break the Pioneers’ momentum with a power-play tally courtesy of Brandon Denham, who tipped in a John Rey shot at 13:24 to knot the game at three. The scoring cooled off, but the chances kept coming from both teams over the remainder of the second period and the first half of the third.
A golden opportunity awaited the Pioneers when Alex Bontje was sent to the box for elbowing. As it turned out, it was a great chance for the Colonials, too. Lynch and Cody Wydo found themselves on a shorthanded 2-on-1 on the ensuing Sacred Heart power play and they made the fourth Robert Morris goal a work of art as Lynch curled and dragged the puck around the lone Sacred Heart defender, then made a perfect pass to a waiting Wydo at the side of the net for the easy tip in at 12:20 of the third.
The Pioneers had one more comeback left though as Sabitini notched his second goal of the game with a low shot from the left circle that found its way past Shafer to tie the score once again at 13:55.
“I loved our resiliency tonight,” Sacred Heart coach C.J. Marottolo said. “We were chasing the game a little bit, but I thought our second period was very good. We made some mistakes and they made us pay. They have some very good offensive players and a lot of skill, but overall, I was proud of our effort. We did a lot of good things.”
