Overtime goal ends weekend on a high note

If the entire men's hockey season up to this point were condensed into one two-game weekend homestand, then surely we just witnessed it. The game summaries from Friday's 3-2 loss to Yale and Saturday's 3-2 win over Brown read like a season review: one-goal finishes, late-game heroics, clutch performances from the stars, key contributions from the freshmen and, perhaps most significantly, .500 hockey.

The one-win, one-loss weekend for the Tigers (9-9-2 overall, 6-7-1 ECAC Hockey) leaves Princeton with a .500 record for the season, no small feat considering it won only one of its first eight games.

"It's nice to be [at the .500 mark] given how we started the season, but we feel that we've been playing well enough to get above it," senior defenseman Brett Westgarth said.

The Tigers certainly have been playing well recently, winning eight of their last 11 including a four-game winning streak and a 4-2 victory at No. 19 Quinnipiac (11-6-4, 8-3-3) last Tuesday before the Bulldogs (8-7-2, 5-5-0) rolled into town Friday night.

Facing off against Princeton for the 223rd time since the rivals' first match in 1901, Yale jumped out to an early lead midway through the first period when Mark Arcobello drove the puck past screened freshman goaltender Zane Kalemba to give the Elis a 1-0 advantage.

Yale increased its lead to two barely a minute into the second period, but the Tigers countered a few minutes later when freshman forward Cam MacIntyre buried a rebound on a rare four-on-three advantage to cut the lead in half.

Late in the period, the Bulldogs caught a break when an attempted cross-ice pass deflected off a Tiger defender and past a sliding Kalemba.

"[Senior defenseman Daryl] Marcoux made a good play on the two-on-one. He stopped the pass, but it ended up going into the net," Westgarth said.

After the unfortunate bounce, Princeton's attackers came out harder than ever in the third, firing 13 shots on goal but only managing to get one in. At 13 minutes, 22 seconds into the period, freshman forward Dan Bartlett scored a big goal on an unassisted effort to bring the Tigers within striking distance, but that was all the team could muster as Yale held off the attack to come away with the 3-2 win.

The next night Princeton hosted another Ivy League opponent, the Bears (7-7-3, 3-6-1), but this time was on the winning end. The Tigers dominated play throughout the game, outshooting their opponent 42-22 and never trailing.

Marcoux opened the scoring 14:41 into the game with his first goal since Feb. 4, 2005. The initial shot by freshman forward Kevin Kaiser was stopped by Brown goaltender Dan Rosen, but Marcoux swept in on the rebound and buried it to break his goal drought and give his team the lead.

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The Bears knotted the game at one a few minutes later, but the Tigers stormed out of the gate early in the second and regained the lead when senior forward Grant Goeckner-Zoeller took a feed from sophomore forward Brett Wilson and whipped the puck into the far upper reaches of the cage.

The game chugged along until the last five minutes of regulation, when Brown's Jeff Prough stunned Princeton's home crowd by tying the score on a drive to the net. The teams headed to overtime, where a sloppy line change by the Bears earned them a penalty for having too many men on the ice. It only took half a minute for Goeckner-Zoeller to administer the punishment, driving home a power-play goal at 1:29 to send Brown back to Providence with the loss.

"[Getting the game-winner in overtime] felt really good, especially since we felt like we sort of let one slip away on Friday," Goeckner-Zoeller said.

With final exams looming large, Goeckner-Zoeller shared his thoughts on the post-finals schedule.

"Our first goal is to get a home-ice playoff series. We have to do a good job of being disciplined and staying ready to play, and hopefully if we do that we'll have a good last third of the season."