The 30th annual Big Red Freakout! and the Clarkson rivalry are just days away and the men’s hockey team has snapped its five-game losing streak just in time for the big games. The team returned from its holiday break with a pair of losses to Vermont (0-3) and Union (1-5) in the University of Vermont’s annual holiday tournament in Burlington, Vt. The next weekend, the Engineers (now 6-10-6) invited the old ivies for a pair of games that ended in a 1-5 loss to Harvard and a particularly painful 2-6 loss to Dartmouth.
Last weekend was the Route 7 rivalry home-and-away series that started off especially poorly for RPI as Union beat up on the team in a 0-5 loss in the Houston Field House. Eizenman’s return, it appeared, couldn’t snap their streak as they had now been outscored 24-4 after the break.
Saturday night, however, was all for RPI’s taking as the Union team came out flat hoping for another easy rout and also ran into penalty trouble early and often in RPI’s 3-2 victory.
The Engineers scored the first three goals and held off the Dutchmen’s late recovery—at one point smoothly turning a 4-2 Union breakaway into a breakaway of their own.
Although RPI did come away with an exciting win, a controversial Dutchman’s goal at 9:06 in the third period looked to have slipped under the back of the net to both the press and players and gave the Union team life in the then one-goal game.
RPI was pressured early as they killed a five-minute major which had forward Andrei Uryadov ejected from the game for checking from behind. The team turned it around quickly as junior Jonathan Ornelas left the penalty box and beat Union’s net minder to continue his goal scoring streak to three in the last five after a 28-game drought. “That was the big momentum shift of the night,” senior defenseman Jake Luthi told the Times Union. “Last night they got a few power-play goals on us, and after we were able to kill a five-minute (penalty), we were on a good roll, and this was definitely something we could build on. This is a very big win tonight.”
As the two teams battled it out for the basement of the ECAC Hockey League, the win put the Dutchmen (10-10-2) back into last place in the league and ended Union’s 5-0-2 streak in the rivalry. January 10, 2004 was the last time RPI had defeated Union.
The much-needed win gives the team some momentum coming out of the midseason doldrums and heading into vital turning-point weekend play. “We executed a little bit better offensively,” Head Coach Seth Appert told the Times Union after the victory. “We did a lot of things this week to try to turn the ship in the right direction. It feels like the most important game [of the season] right now because we now have a result for the players to believe where we’re going.”
Great hockey is a guarantee this weekend with Friday night’s bout against Clarkson, and then the always-epic Big Red Freakout! against St. Lawrence University. Although the team has a history of pulling off big wins, and hasn’t lost in 16 years, the last team to beat them was St. Lawrence.
