The Engineers of the first half of the season put in an unwelcome appearance against Cornell Friday night in Lake Placid, spoiling an otherwise brilliant playoff run for Rensselaer.
A Senior Night win over Colgate and some help from Brown’s opponents meant that RPI started the postseason at home against the Princeton Tigers.
The teams played fairly evenly through the first two periods of Game 1, with RPI taking an early lead, Princeton passing them to start out the second, and the Engineers tying it up late in the period.
The third period, though, belonged to Chris Migliore. His line immediately went to work, breaking down the Tiger defense. Just over a minute in the period, Migliore struck gold with a one-timer to put RPI in front. Thirteen seconds later, he beat Princeton’s Dave Stathos a second time with the eventual game-winner. Eric Cavosie and Jim Vickers assisted on both goals.
Game 2 of the series was simply no contest—the Engineers were in control from start to finish. Nate Marsters was a rock in the net and 11 different players contributed to the scoring as Rensselaer pounded Princeton 6-0 to advance to the ECAC tournament.
As the fifth seed, RPI’s first match was the play-in game against the fourth-seeded Big Green of Dartmouth—the winner would advance to take on Cornell. Marsters was the star of the game here, holding Dartmouth to just one goal on 35 shots. Neither team was able to light the lamp until Christopher Baldwin scored for the Big Green with nine minutes left in the contest.
RPI went to one of its big guns to tie the game: Matt Murley scored with two and a half minutes remaining to make the score 1-1, and Scott Basiuk won the match with an unassisted goal 88 seconds later, advancing the Engineers to the semifinals.
The match against the Big Red was disappointing for the Engineers. RPI mustered a bit of sustained offense in the second period, but was otherwise stymied by a tough Cornell defense. The Big Red cracked Marsters three times, but once was all they needed to send RPI to the consolation game, shutting out the Engineers 3-0.
Saturday’s match against Clarkson, who lost to Harvard in the other semifinal match, was largely a replay of this year’s Big Red Freakout. The Golden Knights built up a sizeable lead through the first two periods, and the Engineers erased that deficit in the third. RPI was helped out by Clarkson’s Adam Campana, who tried to take Murley out of the game with a stick to the face. Campana was hit with a minor, a major, and a game disqualification, giving RPI a seven-minute power play on which they scored to tie the game. Murley then put an exclamation point on his college career scoring the game winner with 32 seconds left and allowing the Engineers to end the season with a victory.
