Minnesota's 2 nights in Duluth turned out very differently. The No. 9 Bulldogs beat the No. 20 Gophers 7-1 on Friday. Minnesota came back Saturday from 2 goals down to tie 2-2 and then won the shootout. The Gophers were 0-3-1 overall, and Minnesota Duluth moved to 3-1-2.
Friday went wrong early. UMD sophomore Luke Bibby scored 1:08 into the game, and Braden Fischer made it 2-0 at 10:32. Freshman Jacob Kvasnicka got Minnesota on the board at 18:58 of the first period. It was his first NCAA goal, and it was also the Gophers' only goal of the night.
The second period decided the game. Victor Plante scored his first collegiate goal at 4:58 to make it 3-1. At 9:18, LJ Mooney was given a 5-minute major for boarding, and the Bulldogs scored 3 power-play goals during it in less than 2 minutes. Hunter Anderson scored at 10:46, and Ty Hanson followed at 11:48 and 12:40. Anderson added another goal 4:23 into the third period. UMD outshot Minnesota 38-25 and went 3-for-7 on the power play. The Gophers went 0-for-2. Freshman goaltender Carl Axelsson stopped 24 of the 25 shots he faced. The crowd of 7,052 was a sellout.
The final score also carried some history. UMD said it was the program's first 7-goal game against Minnesota since the 1998-99 season, and its first 6-goal win over the Gophers since 1982-83.
Saturday started out looking like more of the same. Aaron Pionk scored at 19:31 of the first period, and the Bulldogs went up 2-0. Then Ziemer, the junior captain, took over. At 6:13 he scored his first goal of the season, set up by Evan Murr and Austin Burnevik. At 12:13, exactly 6 minutes later, he tied the game on the power play from Wyatt Cullen and Tanner Henricks.
Nobody scored over the final 2 periods, but Minnesota came close. A Gophers goal in the third period was waved off because the puck had deflected off an official.
Luca Di Pasquo then kept the Gophers in it. He finished with 34 saves, 7 of them in overtime. In the shootout, Cullen and Mooney both scored, and Di Pasquo stopped 2 of UMD's 3 attempts. Mooney's goal won it, which made up for the Friday penalty that opened the floodgates. The shootout doesn't change the result: in the standings and for NCAA purposes, the game counts as a tie.
Minnesota still hasn't won a game this season, but this weekend showed some progress. The Gophers responded to their worst result of the young season by holding a top-10 team scoreless for more than 40 minutes and erasing a 2-goal deficit. Discipline is the obvious fix: 1 major penalty decided Friday's game. Saturday showed what this team looks like when it stays out of the box and its captain gets going.
