OMAHA, Neb. — Omaha stared down a 2-0 deficit entering the third period against Alabama-Huntsville on Sunday. But with two power-play goals and a last-minute score off a faceoff in third period, the No. 12 Mavericks rallied to a 3-3 draw and extended their unbeaten streak to five.
With 21 seconds left, Dominic Zombo won a faceoff and got the puck to Jake Guentzel, who scored the equalizing goal.
“You have 20 seconds, you’re just trying to get pucks to the net,” Guentzel said. “My first thought was just to get it on the net, and I was fortunate for a bounce off the stick [or] something.”
After a scoreless first period, the Chargers jumped out to their two-goal lead with the help of four consecutive Omaha penalties. Both goals came against Mavericks freshman goaltender Brock Crossthwaite in his first collegiate start.
UAH scored first at 5:32 when Jack Prince had an easy look to beat Crossthwaite on his glove side. The goal came exactly two minutes after a penalty on Brian Cooper for slashing.
Later at 11:48, Max McHugh scored on another power play after James Polk was called for hooking.
“I thought two teams with two very different styles of play played tonight,” Omaha assistant coach Alex Todd said. “And the first two periods, I thought they were able to control it and dictate a little bit more of their style.”
In the third period, the Mavs replaced Crossthwaite with Ryan Massa and started to turn things around.
In a mirror image of the second period, the Mavs were treated to four consecutive power plays of their own in the third and scored on two of them, both by Austin Ortega.
At 5:08, five seconds after Alex Carpenter was called for holding, Ortega buried a rebounded shot from Luc Snuggerud to pull the Mavs within one at 2-1.
But on the subsequent possession, the Mavs faced a rush where the puck got kicked away from Massa, who was reaching to cover it up. Alex Carpenter flicked in score on the exposed net to again give the Chargers a two-goal lead.
“For us to get three goals, we’d like to think on most nights we’ll have a really good chance of winning the game,” Alabama-Huntsville coach Mike Corbett said. “Especially two on the power play and one five on five answering off of them. For us to get goals like that, we feel good about ourselves.”
Ortega brought the Mavs within one again when he was able to force a puck through traffic at 9:42 in the third.
Omaha flirted with an empty net near the end of a UAH power play at 16:37 and had an extra attacker on the ice when Guentzel fired his game-tying shot.
“You’ve got to win the draw,” Zombo said. “You lose the draw and the puck’s going down the ice and it kills a lot of time. I was fortunate enough to win the draw and Jake got a really good shot off.”
Omaha carried its momentum into the overtime and the Mavs were able to get three shots on goal and plenty of rushes, but UAH held on and didn’t allow another goal.
Most of the overtime saw the puck in the Chargers’ zone as Omaha had the pedal to the metal to close the game.
“And that’s been our biggest thing as you can see from our record. We’ve got a lot of losses so why are we afraid? Don’t be afraid; just go for it,” Corbett said. “And we also know we’ve had times where sometimes you’ve got to take punches and dig in and you’ve got to defend. We had to be ready to go. We had a couple of them go across the crease and stuff like that but we wanted to play to win [like] we’ve got nothing to lose.”
Following overtime, Omaha won an exhibition shootout against the Chargers and enters the holiday break with a taste less sour than a loss to UAH would have provided.
“You take what you can get. Obviously, a tie is not good,” Zombo said. “And it will probably affect us a little bit in the PairWise. But we showed a lot of heart to battle back. Guys beared down at the end of the game and made it happen.”
And while UAH left Omaha without a victory, Corbett said he felt that a draw against one of the top teams in college hockey is a memorable moment for the Chargers program.
“This is a positive weekend for us,” Corbett said. “We’d love to have the win and walk away right now but when you’re building a program, these are victories. Our program is growing; this was another growth.”
