The Danville Dashers took down the Delaware Thunder in the weekend finale on home ice at the David S. Palmer Arena in downtown Danville, Illinois on Saturday night.
The first period of the Friday night installment of the Delaware Thunder and Danville Dashers match up featured a whopping zero goals, in a 20-minute span that seemed to fly by without much in the way of excitement.
The opening period of Saturday’s game couldn’t have been any more of the opposite.
It was just 29 seconds into the game when Mitch Atkins beat former-Dasher and current Thunder starting goaltender Aaron Taylor to open the scoring in front of a packed David S. Palmer Arena in Danville.
The feed from Seth Ensor and Artem Efimov-Barakov was more than pretty enough to get the Danville crowd on their feet and loud in the early part of the game. Ensor’s defensive pairing Jesse Neher was also in on the play, although not one of the two assisting players.
After that it was Atkins’ turn to provide the set-up play, as the Dashers pushed players forward in a big way to get off on the right foot after last night’s disappointing start (although the end result was in their favor). Atkins linked up with Efimov-Barakov to provide the assist for Tyler Quintos, moving the score to 2-0 in favor of the Dashers with just over ten minutes off the game clock.
The Dashers went on a Jenna Worth power play with 13:11 gone in the first period when Thomas Munichiello was tagged for a delay of game, allowing them to pour on even more pressure. It was Quintos again who found the back of the net after a Brad Denney shot rebounded dangerously off the left blocker of Delaware’s Taylor, and was buried by Quintos. Atkins tagged his third point of the night on the play, with Quintos bagging his second goal in under five minutes.
With the seconds ticking down on a Danville penalty, and the first period, it was Mitch Atkins who completed the four-point period when he made a beautiful coast-to-coast effort on goal.
Atkins fought off the Delaware attack, and provided a nice outlet pass to Fred Hein, and with that back-and-forth link-up Atkins found himself open in front of net, with Aaron
Taylor the last man to beat. Taylor was unable to stop Atkins, who once again brought the Dashers crowd to their feet in an impressive period.
The first period ended with some pushing and shoving from both sides, a foreshadow of the game to come when the teams exited the tunnel heading into the second.
The second period of action started out quiet, with just a switch of goaltenders for Delaware, but would finish up with seeing one player ejected, and a combined total of 31 minutes of penalty time. 15 of those assessed minutes were to Delaware’s Anthony Pisano after a big hit on Patrik Zilak that saw him drop the gloves as Zilak rebounded off of the boards.
Before that though it was Danville who scored the only goal of the period, when Patrik Zilak went top-net to beat Aaron Taylor’s replacement who came on at the start of the second for Delaware, Sebastien DeMassa-Carlsson. Tyler Quintos grabbed his third point of the night, and Brad Denney his second on assists on that even-strength goal.
Charlie Pens Jr. and Levi Armstrong brought the crowd to their feet when the former teammates squared off in a friendly, but ferocious fight at center ice with Armstrong using a right arm hold on Pens to land several strong, right-handed blows, popping the helmet off of his opposition before the two were separated.
That friendly scrap was nothing compared to what was to come.
At the very end of the second period, it was chaos which reigned supreme with just 4.3 seconds left on the clock, when Anthony Pisano checked Zilak into the boards before quickly dropping the gloves and giving him a few hard right hands to the helmet-protected head of the most recent goal-scorer.
Eventually, after the storm cleared, Fred Hein had two penalty minutes for himself for roughing, with Pisano being ejected for the game after a fighting major and game misconduct after being escorted off the ice.
Though it was hectic, the only real game-impacting moment was the fifth goal added on by Danville, and the two teams headed into the third period with Danville well in control.
Early in the third period Delaware finally got on the board with a pair of goals from newcomer John Doherty to make the score 5-2.
The Dashers then scored the final three goals in the last 10 minutes from Mitch Atkins, Tyler Quintos and Levi Armstrong to make the final 8-2 and sweep the weekend series from the Thunder.
by Nate Williamson
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