A youth hockey playoff game between a pair of Twin Cities metro teams turned into a marathon event, lasting three days and 12 overtimes.
The Cottage Grove Wolfpack and St. Paul Saints (St. Paul & West St. Paul co-op) U-12 girls teams started playing at 7:30 p.m. Monday night at South St. Paul’s Doug Woog Arena, but the game was tied 1-1 after three regulation periods and six overtimes.
Play was suspended at 10:45 p.m. and resumed Tuesday with the seventh overtime. Despite playing through a 10th overtime, the game remained tied, leading to another suspension.
The teams convened again Wednesday night for the 11th and 12th overtimes.
Earlier in the day Wednesday, District 8 consulted Minnesota Hockey for an agreeable plan in the event the game kept going. With ice time scarcity and the fact the winning team would have to play their next playoff game the following night, the game needed to end Wednesday.
The agreed-upon plan was to play five-on-five for the 11th overtime, then skating three-on-three in the 12th overtime then, if still tied, a shootout after that.
Despite several good chances that repeatedly brought the cheering crowd to its feet, neither team broke thorough as both goalies stood their ground.
After the 12th overtime, the scoreboard still read: “Cottage Grove 1, St. Paul 1”.
Fittingly, even the shootout required an extra frame. Each team scored twice in the planned first five rounds of the shootout – sending the game to sudden death the rest of the way.
Finally, in the 6th round of the shootout – technically the game’s 16th period of play – after St. Paul missed their attempt, Cottage Grove’s Ashlyn Anderson skated in and snapped a sharp wrist shot into the top corner touching off an exhausted, but jubilant, celebration on the Wolfpack’s end of the ice.
After the game, Anderson said it was a move her brother had showed her prior to the game while crediting the entire team for the remarkable victory.
Cottage Grove goalie Lydia Pettey made 96 saves in the game. She and St. Paul’s Ellen Weiberg combined to make 151 saves in the epic while allowing just two goals.
With the victory, Cottage Grove advances in the District 8 playoffs.
In total, the teams played 15 periods of hockey – equivalent to five typical games – plus the extended shootout in over five hours on the ice spread out over three nights.
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