MADISON – The path to victory wasn’t pretty this weekend, but Wisconsin’s toughness and resiliency showed.
Friday Feb. 6, the Badgers men’s hockey team blew a three-goal lead before regrouping in time to score an overtime victory over Notre Dame.
Saturday Feb 7, UW completed a season sweep of the Fighting irish with a 5-4 win at the Kohl Center. In order to get it the Badgers needed to win a see-saw affair that included two occasions when they responded to Notre Dame game-tying goals with scores of their own and another occasion when they needed to come back from a one-goal deficit.
Wisconsin (17-9-2, 10-8 Big Ten, 27 points) entered the series with a six-game losing streak and came out of it encouraged.
“We were just positive all week,” sophomore forward Ryan Botterill said. “We just talked about staying together as a family and keep working. We knew what we had to work on this week and we did that. Over the weekend we got two wins. It’s pretty huge for us and it feels good.”
Senior forward Christian Fitzgerald scored his third game winner of the season with about 10 minutes left in the third period. The UW defense did he rest, turning back six shots and blocking four others during the remainder of the game.
The Wisconsin defense, which has taken its lumps recently, shut out Notre Dame for the final 29 ½ minutes. Freshman goaltender Daniel Hauser, who allowed five goals Friday, didn’t get the start Saturday but came off the bench after sophomore Eli Pulver struggled and finished with 13 saves. Eleven of those stops were in the fourth quarter.
“Guys stuck with it,” Badgers coach Mike Hastings said. “As much as maybe Daniel’s been through here recently, for him to come in and shut the door the way that he did (was big). And we needed him to.
“It’s hard to win in our league, and for us to be down the way we were and come back and find a way to get it done was a really important weekend for us.”
The series didn’t cure all that ailed Wisconsin during its six-game losing streak, but the games served as a step forward for its struggling offense.
The Badgers, who averaged two goals per game during its skid, scored 11 goals during the series. And all of the goals Saturday were 5 on 5.
Saturday five players finished with one goal and 10 had a point. Seniors Ben Dexheimer (one goal, one assist) and Simon Tassy (one goal, one assist) and juniors Quinn Finley (one goal, one assist) and Joe Palodichuk (two assists) had multi-point games.
Finley, whose goal at the 11-minute mark of the first period gave the Badgers a 2-1 edge, scored for the second straight game after a six-game dry spell. Tassy’s goal, which came with 23 seconds left in the first period, gave the Badgers a 3-2 lead and was his first since Dec. 6 at Notre Dame. Botterill’s goal, which tied the game, 4-4, at the 13:35 mark of the second period, was his first Big Ten score since Dec. 5 at Notre Dame.
The game-winner marked was the second straight assisted by sophomore Gavin Morrissey, who did the job with a well-timed entry pass to Fitzgerald as he entered the left side of the zone.
Hastings was a fan of the finish, too.
“The one thing that I loved about it is Fitz can shoot a puck” Hastings said. “And at times this year, he’s deferred, and he didn’t tonight. And you know, that’s something hopefully we can build on for him.”
There were two other areas from Saturday the Badgers hope to build on.
Penalties: UW finished with just one penalty Saturday despite plenty of physical play. It entered play averaging about 15 penalty minutes per game and was coming off a series of intense series with Michigan State, Penn State and Minnesota.
“We’ve gone through a stretch here where there hasn’t been a lot of love sprinkled around,” Hastings said. “It’s been a bit of a grind and we just talked about making sure that we don’t stack the chips any steeper than they need to be through frustration penalties, stick penalties.
“Tonight, the refs let both teams play and you know, it was back and forth. I don’t know what their coach is going to say, but for me, it’s we’re going a good direction offensively.”
Defense: The Badgers hope the final 30 minutes are a sign of things to come from the team defensively.
Credit Hauser for making some of his saves on his own, but the Badgers success during the second half of the game went beyond that.
“I thought our communication was big time,” Fitzgerald said. “I thought different looks we had, maybe different areas where you might just extend the play and get it out of the zone (that) guys were talking. We were making those small plays … that was huge for us.”
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