VIDEO: NDA freshman Chase Harmon nets winning PP goal vs. Braintree
Harmon converted a feed from Sarah White for a 2-1 lead with 1:16 left in the first period Saturday. The goal stood as the winner in a 3-1 victory.
ROCKLAND – Notre Dame Academy hockey coach John Findley was under the weather on Feb. 15, so much so that he had to check out early from his team’s game at The Bog in Kingston. “I was so sick,” he recalled. “It was terrible.”
He had plenty of company as NDA’s players weren’t feeling so great themselves that night after coming up short in a much-anticipated showdown with fellow state powerhouse Duxbury.
Everybody seems to be doing much better since then.
In fact, the Cougars have won six straight since that disappointing night. The latest conquest was a 3-1 win over No. 16 Braintree on Saturday in a Division 1 Round-of-16 battle at a packed Rockland Ice Rink. The victory sends top-seeded NDA (16-4-2) on to a quarterfinal against the winner of Sunday’s game between No. 8 Pope Francis (13-7-2) and No. 9 Peabody (17-4).
Since that 2-0 loss to Duxbury, the Cougars are, as we said, 6-0 and have outscored opponents 21-6. The best win in that stretch was a 2-1 overtime victory over St. Mary’s (Lynn), which is No. 2 seed in Div. 1 and looms as a potential opponent in the March 17 state final at TD Garden. In this current heater, NDA also scored regular-season wins over Haverhill/Pentucket/North Andover — yes, that’s one team — plus Natick and Needham and kicked off its playoff run with a 7-1 wipeout of No. 32 Franklin in the first round.
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The Duxbury loss was just 16 days ago, but it feels much farther away than that now.
“That game was big for us because Duxbury’s always a big rival of ours,” said senior goalie Ava Larkin of Canton. “We were definitely very excited to go into that game, and losing it was definitely upsetting. But it was a mind-shift almost [after that]; we realized there were a couple of things that we needed to fix. And we went to practice and we got to work and we fixed them.”
Junior forward Sarah White, of Hanover, who had a goal and an assist vs. Braintree, said the Cougars “100 percent” vowed to themselves that the Duxbury game would be their last loss of the season.
“We’ve really been working hard at practice, getting the energy up in the locker room and just coming together as a team,” White said. “I feel like a lot of girls have stepped up…
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