Rochester, NY-The top-ranked and undefeated Illinois hockey team put a scare into some of its fans early in its first round national tournament match up with Robert Morris University in Rochester, NY, allowing a Colonial power play goal halfway in the fist to tie the game at one. The orange and blue came out sluggish in the first period, with much of the action happening in the Illini zone.

But Daniel Cohen came to the rescue to put the Illini out front 2-1 at the end of the first with a masterful deke followed by a backhanded wrister past Bobby Mo goalie John Hoffman. From there, the Illini added a tally each in the second and third periods to get three out of four of their goals on the power play, which goes to show that the old adage is true—special teams are more important when it comes to playoff hockey. Chad Cassel’s bunch took the final 4-1, with junior defenseman Brad Hoelzer getting two goals on wrist shots from the blue line. Mike Burda also played an unbelievable game, bailing out his defenseman multiple times.

So the Illini survived and advanced, avoiding an early exit from the national tournament and reducing their magic number to three. If you want to see the Illini in action, you can visit www.achahockey.org to catch a webcast of the orange and blue in Rochester, with WPGU’s own Jon Hansen, Blake Stubbs, and myself calling the action. If you want to reach us during the broadcast or want to send out a message to a loved one, you can email us at achanationals@gmail.com. The webcast is only a five dollar fee to watch all of the games this weekend with very crisp audio and video feeds. Keep it locked here at the DI sports blog for more updates throughout the national tournament

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 11:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, illini hockey, acha national tournament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.