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Last updated: Wednesday, May 9, 10:51 a.m.
Sports

Women’s hockey drops home opener against Wisconsin

The sixth-ranked Badgers had their hands full with the Black Bears

By Matt Hritz
Posted on Oct. 20, 2003, at 12:00 a.m.
HOOKING - Black Bear Tristan Desmet skates past a Wisconsin player in the Sunday afternoon season opener. Desmet scored the first goal of the game for the Black Bears, but the team fell 5-4 to the Badgers.
Anna -Maria Easley
HOOKING - Black Bear Tristan Desmet skates past a Wisconsin player in the Sunday afternoon season opener. Desmet scored the first goal of the game for the Black Bears, but the team fell 5-4 to the Badgers.

The University of Maine women’s hockey team (0-1-0) kicked off the 2003-2004 season with a 5-4 loss to the sixth-ranked University of Wisconsin Badgers (3-0-0). Despite being out-shot 46-12 and down by four goals at one point, the Black Bears made a commendable effort against a national powerhouse on Sunday.

“That was a good team,” UMaine head coach Rick Filighera said. “I think it’ll open some people’s eyes because our problem in the past has been our ability to score goals and look at the amount of shots we got on goal and we were able to put four goals in.”

After being down 2-0 in the first six minutes of the game, the Black Bears got their first goal of the season from junior forward Tristan Desmet who aggressively skated through the Badger defenders and scored an unassisted goal with 26 seconds remaining in the first period.

Twenty seconds later, Wisconsin got the goal back as senior forward Karen Rickard got one past senior goaltender Lara Smart.

Within the first five minutes of the second period though the Badgers put together two more goals and extended their lead to 5-1. The Black Bears fought back and scored three unanswered goals in the remainder of the game to come up short in defeating the Badgers.

Senior forward Meagan Aarts scored two goals for the Black Bears in the second period as she scored an unassisted goal at 5:45 in the period on a breakaway. Three minutes later, Aarts tipped in her second goal of the game as sophomore defenseman Vicky Johnstone and junior forward Cheryl White obtained assists on the play.

The last goal of the game came at 12:19 of the third period as freshman forward Kate Sunstrum fired one past Badger goaltender Christine Dufour to make it a one-goal game at 5-4.

Dufour made eight saves for Wisconsin while Smart stopped 39 for the Black Bears.

After playing another game with Wisconsin today at 2 p.m., the Black Bears will host Colgate next weekend at 7 p.m. on Saturday and 3 p.m. on Sunday.

“It’s going to be a situation now where we have a pretty good view of where we are capable of playing,” Filighera said. “We didn’t play a very good game and we were still in it. That’s a positive.”

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2003, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.

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