LEWISTON — The signs posted on the Greely Rangers’ locker-room door said it all. Poised to become the first girls’ hockey team in the current format to win a second state championship and riding a 14-game unbeaten streak, the Rangers did not disappoint, though it took a bit longer than they’d planned.
Mary Morrison gathered the puck in the middle slot on a feed from Sarah Kurland and used a heavy screen in front of the cage to fool Skowhegan keeper Devan Kane with a wrister at 3:44 of the overtime period, lifting the East champion Rangers to a thrilling 1-0 win over the Red Storm in front of a sizable crown at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee on Saturday.
“You can just see the skill there,” Greely coach Nate Guerin said. “She beats three girls in five seconds and lets a shot go. She sees the game so well, she’s unbelievable, she does so well for us.”
The Rangers (18-2-1) peppered Kane with shot after shot through regulation, but the veteran keeper did not blink, finishing with 39 saves on 40 shots for the game.
“She’s really the backbone of this team,” Scarborough coach Caitlin Cashman said.
“We had 40 shots the first time too, and we know she’s going to stop 95 percent of everything she sees in there,” Guerin said. “Getting one through traffic there, it was the same formula we try to teach all the time, a good, hard, low shot that might get tipped on the way through.”
The teams met once during the regular season, and they fittingly skated to a 2-2 deadlock in December, though in that game the Rangers also outshot the Red Storm (18-2-1) by a wide margin.
“Just like tlast time, only this time someone had to win,” Guerin said. “It was a very close game, a great effort by both teams.”
“Both teams really wanted it, both teams knew what was at stake, and it was the same kind of game that we played back in December,” Cashman said. “It was a little bit back and forth. Greely does a really good job in the offensive zone.”
In Saturday’s contest, Greely shot out to a 12-1 advantage in shots in the first 10 minutes, but couldn’t solve Kane. On the other end, Greely keeper Maura Perry — a sophomore who hadn’t play in goal prior to this season — kept the pucks that she did see away from the goal mouth.
The Red Storm found some offense in the second frame, but couldn’t solve Perry, with most of their shots coming from the outside.
The win gives Greely back-to-back state titles, the first girls’ team in the five-year history of MPA sanctioned tournaments to win multiple titles. The Rangers already were the only team other then Lewiston (2009-10) to appear in more than one title game. Perry’s shutout is the second in tourney history, following Saundrine Lanouette’s victory over Lewiston in 2010.
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