The Prince George Cougars are not losing hope, they just have to find a way to win tonight in Portland.
Down 3-1 in their best-of-seven series to the Portland Winterhawks, they know there’s no tomorrow for their team if they come out on the losing end of the stick and are unable to extend the series to bring it home to Prince George.
They’ve had a full day to digest what went wrong in Game 4 on Wednesday when the Cougars came agonizingly close to tying the series but lost it in double-overtime.
Diego Buttazzoni ended what was the longest game in the Cougars’ 31-year Prince George WHL history when he scored 19:57 into the second overtime period to give the Winterhawks a 5-4 victory.
Cougar defenceman Carson Carels scored on a power play with less than two minutes left in regulation time to put the Cats ahead, but Portland tied it with the goalie on the bench when Ryan Miller jammed in a rebound with 24 seconds left to send it into overtime.
That was the difference between having a tied series and what could be the Cougars’ final game of the season.
“It was a crazy game, I thought our team played really well, we really worked and hustled and a lot of guys had great games and I felt it could have gone either way and sadly it went Portland’s way but that’s alright, we’re still battling and we’ve still got a lot of hope,” said Cougars centre Matteo Danis, who scored the Cougars’ second goal in Game 4.
A Prince George win tonight (7 p.m.) would mean there would be a Game 6 Sunday at CN Centre with a chance for the Cougars to push it to Game 7 on Monday.
“We know what’s at stake, it’s do or die,” said Danis. “There’s nothing we want more as a group than to drag it back to PG, in front of our fans in our city, so we’re going to do everything we can to do that.
“We’re such a proud group. We went through this last year and we want it so bad. There’s a lot of passionate guys in that locker room and we’re not losing any hope at all. We know the fans back home aren’t losing any belief, it’s in this locker room we know we can do it.”
For Cougar overagers Koehn Ziemmer, Borya Valis and Viliam Kmec, the real prospect of tonight’s game marking the end of their junior careers is not something they want to consider.
The Cougars will have their captain and leading scorer, Riley Heidt, back in the lineup tonight after he served a one-game suspension. But it’s not likely Bauer Dumanski, their top defensive defenceman will be back. He’s out with an unspecified injury he aggravated in Game 3 that kept him out of the lineup in Wednesday.
Special teams have been a deciding factor in the games so far and the Cougars realize they’ll have to do a better job staying out of the penalty box. They took eight minors in Game 4 and the Winterhawks scored two of their goals on power plays. The Cougars finally clicked on their power play Wednesday and scored three of their four goals that way after going 0-for-8 in the first three games.
“We’re focused, we’re prepared, guys know that they’ve got to do, it doesn’t come down to X’s and O’s and systems any more, we’ve made the adjustments we had to,” said Cougars assistant coach Carter Rigby. “I thought they were great adjustments by Mark (Lamb) to give us a chance and we found a little juice and a little spark in our group. It comes to really who wants it most. These are the games you dream about as a kid, you want to be that hero.”
Portland has scored first in every game so far and the Cougars will obviously look to get their offence going early to avoid having to play catchup all the time. They rallied from a 5-2 deficit in Game 1 to win 7-6 in overtime, then lost the next two games 5-2 and 6-3.
Cole Waldie will have the play-by-play descriptions on the broadcast starting tonight at 6:40 p.m. (The Goat, 94.3 FM). The games are also being streamed live for free on Victory Plus.
