THE CUP IS IN THE BUILDING!
Along with a well above average number of fans watching.
For the championship game before ours. Neither stuck around for our game.
But the championship game went to overtime and then through a shootout and then some extra shooters in the shootout before finally the team that was best throughout the whole season won.
All that took a while and then after our warmup we took team pictures and then finally started to play our consolation game. Being just a consolation game many guys like to switch things up and play different positions and stuff. Honestly I don't get it at all. But considering that maybe a quarter of our team was playing where they normally play I felt we started strong and dominated play for most of the first period. We had plenty of shots but none of them seemed particularly dangerous and I had no trouble making the saves I had to and it was scoreless after the first period.
The team we were facing was a distant fourth in the four team league where the other three teams finished pretty close together, and we've beaten them plenty of times before. They do feature a guy who always plays kind of physically and more dirty than is usual for the league which is specifically meant to be for fun.
He was doing that again tonight and during the second basically tackled one of our female players behind their goal and she stayed down on the ice for a minute or so kind of shaken up by the play. I took the opportunity to work on the tie for my mask dangler which had come undone so I didn't see exactly what happened after that. My guess is that our players were upset about the play, especially how the refs didn't call the blatantly obvious penalty and I assume someone said something and the end result was we were on the penalty kill.
That lead to then getting an open chance on goal after some shots and passes and I stopped a pass across with my stick but then tried to slide over to stop the shot and thought I had it but it somehow got through my pads and into the net. That was frustrating.
We continued to mostly control play after that though and scored a goal not much later from our only regular defender who was playing defense tonight, which I thought was pretty funny.
In the third it was pretty much the same except as the refs continued to not call their goon player who kept slashing people our players got frustrated and started being more physical too and among all that there was a play where the puck bounced behind the net from one side to the other, where our defense was out of position since they normally don't play defense. I got across fast enough to get my arm on the shot and for a second thought I had gotten far enough to hit it to the outside of the net but I was wrong and it was in for a second goal.
That was certainly frustrating and things just got worse after that. We were trying to score to tie the game and had a shot on goal which their goalie stopped and then left sitting loose between his pads. I could clearly see the puck from the other goal. Our captain was there near their net and reached for the obviously loose puck and poked it into the goal.
There had been a good amount of yelling about the puck not being covered, I was yelling it myself even. So I absolutely believe that he didn't hear the not very loudly blown and ridiculously early whistle. But the ref was all pissed and even though we were already on a penalty kill somehow called our captain for slashing and said it was no goal.
Our captain didn't really like that and argued the absolutely ridiculous call and the ref then threw him out of the game. It made no sense at all. Last week there was a similar play where I had stopped and covered the puck and the ref blew the whistle and I dropped it earlier than I should have and their player put it in the net. It was called not a goal and I told him to play the whistle and then we lined up for a face-off and kept playing. The only differences in this case were that the puck should have never been blown dead and the ref was incredibly unreasonable about the play.
After that everything was just kind of a total shitshow. We kept pushing to try to score even with guys confused about what positions they were playing in and more and more penalties being called for things that made no sense at all and in the end it was probably for the best that the time just ran out even though we ended with a frustrating 1-2 loss.
It was absolutely not at all how I wanted to end the season but overall it was still a fun season with some fun guys to play with and we were competitive more nights than not, so that was good.
The league will start up again in a few weeks for the fall season. It is mostly the same players overall but the teams are redrafted every season. Hopefully I get lucky and get some good players on my team and have some fun and maybe even a better ending than this season had.
