St. Michael-Albertville Girls Hockey Upset in Semis

What a different three months makes.

Opening the season, North Wright County hopped on a bus, drove to Sartell and knocked off the Stormin’ Sabres 5-2 in unceremonious fashion, proving it might be the team to beat again in Section 8-2A.

Tuesday night, in a rematch between those two teams provided a much different result, with much more meaningful consequences.

Sartell-Sauk Rapids rolled to a 6-2 victory, ending the RiverHawks’ season prematurely and quashing any hopes of a return to the state tournament for the defending section champions.

“You have to give credit to SSR as they played a great game and basically took it to us physically and out worked us for most of the game,” said head coach Tim Hanson. “As a team I felt we only had a handful of players that showed up ready to play and you just can’t do that at this level.”

The Sabres outshot North Wright County 25-17, and got on the board right away, as Lexi Holman scored just 21 seconds into the game.

SSR made it 2-0, but the Hawks cut it to 2-1 before the end of the second period with a goal from Mackenzie Johnson late.

The story, though, was the third peiord. After the Hawks battle back to tie the game at 2-2 behind Emily Ackterkirch’s goal just two and a half minutes into the period, the Sabres broke the tie two minutes later, and went up 3-2.

The killer was a pair of goals in the 12^th minute, just 18 seconds apart for SSR. Kendra Christiansen scored on a powerplay goal at the 11:25 mark, then Kendra Rasmussen scored her second goal of the period 18 seconds later, making it 5-2.

Rasmussen would get the hat trick with an empty net goal with 21 seconds left, creating the final margin.

The Sabres’ vaunted goalie, Erin Deters, stopped 23 of 25 shots. Amanda Koep of St. Michael-Albertville gave up five goals in the loss, but stopped 11 shots, including two breakaways to keep her team in it through the first and second period.

“After coming off a big quarter final victory, I felt our players took SSR lightly and expected to be playing on Friday night.  Nothing can ever be taken for granted,” Hanson said. “It’s a tough loss, but hopefully we’ll learn from it.”

The squad, which includes STMA, Monticello and Annandale players, recaptured the Mississippi 8 crown, going 6-0-1 in the conference. That’s something next year’s team, which will have a lot of returning players, can build on, Hanson said.

“We have some key seniors, but we’ll bring back a very strong core. It that sense we need to improve on playing as a team like we did during the 2010-2011 season, when we had a lot coming back,” Hanson said.