Senior captain Colby Zarba scored his second goal of the night with 38.9 seconds left in regulation to lift the Vineyarders boys varsity hockey team into a 3-3 tie with the Blue Bombardiers of Attleboro High School, Wednesday night in Attleboro.
The tie was a welcome development in a game that had the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS) faithful both exultant and in a very dark place at various times.
Coach Matt Mincone had called this one the most important game of the season following lackluster performances against Sandwich (1-0 win) and Plymouth North (10-1 loss). “Attleboro is tough for us, but a good chance to prove that Plymouth North was an anomaly,” he said before the game.
Well, the Vineyarders had flashes of brilliance and ineptitude on Wednesday night. But they began with brilliance, dominating the BB’s over the first five minutes of the opening period, with Logan Araujo lighting the lamp with less than five minutes gone.
Attleboro is a lunchpail bunch, and they fought back hard, worked the corners, won a lot of loose pucks, and gave MV netminder Graham Stearns all he wanted, making eight or nine saves, including three special ones, to take a 1-0 lead into the locker room.
The second period opened just like the first. Vineyarders skating, digging, and Zarba took a rebound off a slapper from the blueline and calmly hit the open right corner with 4:19 elapsed for a 2-0 lead.
You would have been forgiven for thinking, “We got this,” but we didn’t.
The nightmare began without warning, on a Vineyarder power play no less, when a bouncing puck found a Bombardier in his defensive end. He fled down the ice and buried it. 2-1 Vineyarders. Fifteen seconds later, it happened again. 2-2 tie with eight minutes left.
Wait, there’s more. Attleboro scored out of a scrum with about four minutes left to take a 3-2 lead. For those of you who are counting, that’s three goals in four minutes against a talented team with inarguably the best goalie on the Cape and Islands.
Third period. Up and down play, goalies making saves, a bit of pond hockey–looking play, but both teams working it until Elias Gundersen got it in the corner behind the Attleboro net and fed Zarba perfectly, who wasted no time burying it with 38.9 ticks left. Game over. The Vineyarders are 1-1-1 in the 2019–20 campaign.
Whether this comeback is the jump-start the team’s been looking for, they won’t have to wait long to find out. Mighty, mighty Hanover High is coming to town at 5 pm on Saturday, and we’ll see what we see.
