On To Tampa: “Just had two options…It’s an easy answer for me”
Michigan grinds past Penn State 2-1 on a Mackie Samoskevich OT winner to clinch a 2nd straight trip to the Frozen Four
If you’ve ever watched Mackie Samoskevich play, you’ve seen it before. Working his way toward the middle from the right flank, a subtle cradle, his stick threatening to explode as he leans into an instantaneous release. He pulls the same trick at least once a period, but it’s safe to say he’s never done it better, nor at a more opportune moment, than sixty-minutes and fifty-two seconds into the Allentown Regional Final Sunday night.
The Wolverine bench emptied to swarm the evening’s hero. The Nittany Lions crumbled to the ice around goaltender Liam Souliere’s crease. The University of Michigan men’s hockey team was on to Tampa, on to the Frozen Four.
“Seamus made a nice play to me, I saw them sitting back, and I knew to take middle and rip it through,” said Samoskevich from his locker after the game, a simple plan carried out to perfection proving the difference in Michigan’s 2-1 overtime win over Penn State.
“I was on the far side of the bench, and I just saw him cut to the middle, and he does his famous toe drag shot,” said junior defenseman Steven Holtz, who knew the way the movie would end as soon as he saw Samoskevich turn in from the wing. “He practices that every day, and you can definitely tell. It was an unbelievable seat in the house to be able to see that from the bench.”
Exactly thirty minutes of real time earlier, Adam Fantilli—the Wolverines’ talismanic freshman forward—buried the rebound off a Rutger McGroarty shot on the power play to tie the score at two with not quite eight minutes to play in regulation. It was an equalizer born less of desperation than it was of deliberation.
For the game’s first thirty-eight minutes and fifty-two seconds, Michigan dominated the Nittany Lions everywhere but the scoreboard. The Wolverines’ attack was in top form—pinning Penn State into its own end for long stretches, generating quality chances through their movement with and away from the puck, carrying a healthy lead on the shot chart. In defense, Michigan looked as sharp as it had all season—denying the Nittany Lions second chance opportunities, backchecking with supreme purpose, Erik Portillo more than holding his own as the last line of defense. But there was one glaring problem: Nothing to show for all that work and instead a zero-zero stalemate.
Well, zero-zero until Connor MacEachern deposited the rebound of a Christian Berger point blast Portillo, and the problem intensified. The shorthanded Wolverines had twice failed to clear their zone, and Penn State punished them for those rare blemishes on a pristine evening. With just over a minute remaining in the second, it was the kind of late-period goal that almost seems to count double—first when it goes in then again when it echoes through the minds of players on both sides as they march back to their dressing rooms for intermission.
To the Wolverines, it was nothing new. “It’s been a grind this year—there’ve been a lot of up and downs, and we’ve really bought into the way we play,” explained sophomore defenseman Ethan Edwards. “We knew we were playing the right way, we knew we were getting those chances. It’d be a different story if we weren’t getting those chances, but we knew we had a chance to win the game.”
In the one minute and two seconds with which they had to work in the second, Michigan offered defiance—returning straight to the Nittany Lion zone and the task of attacking, retrieving, and releasing. Rallying in the third period wouldn’t be about tactical adjustments but rather persistence.
For head coach Brandon Naurato, it wasn’t complicated: “Just had two options. I can be negative on the bench, which’ll feed into the players, or we can keep it positive and try to stick to the plan. It’s an easy answer for me. That’s all credit to the guys.”
Even in the third period, conversion didn’t come without effort. Michigan appeared poised to cash in on a Christian Sarlo kneeing minor at the 4:52 mark of the period—flashing imperious puck movement on the ensuing man advantage and seeming to close ever tighter around Souliere’s crease. But the story was the same: For all the chances, Michigan couldn’t break through.
Until Adam Fantilli barged in.
The Wolverines were on the power play again. The first forty-five seconds of a Carter Schade holding minor elapsed without incident. The clock showed 8:15 to play as Erik Portillo corralled a Nittany Lions’ clearance, and Michigan’s top unit—Fantilli, Samoskevich, Gavin Brindley, Rutger McGroarty, and Luke Hughes—took the ice.
Samoskevich ushered the puck through the neutral zone and fed McGroarty upon their entry into the attacking third. McGroarty sent a rink-wide pass to an area he knew Hughes would fill momentarily. As Hughes strolled from the half wall across the point, Fantilli slapped his stick to the ice to call for the puck. He wasn’t trying to get a shot off—not his own, not yet anyway, and, upon taking Hughes’ eventual feed, the Hobey Baker finalist slipped a pass inside for Samoskevich. Souliere denied the initial shot but couldn’t absorb Fantilli’s follow-up.
At long last, the Wolverines had their goal. Brindley leapt into Fantilli’s arms.
Perhaps it was even too cathartic a moment as Michigan’s worst hockey of the evening seemed to come in what remained in regulation. The Wolverines survived until the horn sounded on regulation.
From there, Naurato went for a new approach in the game’s third intermission. “I just went in laughing after the third period, going into overtime,” he explained. “It was a play and a first-timer, so I didn’t know if it was gonna work or not, but just try to calm the nerves a little bit. You could say it worked, or you could say Mackie Samoskevich had a really, really good shot off the rush.”
Going into the game, the only real question left for the Big Ten champions to answer was whether they could win the kind of tight-checking struggle that always seem to crop up this time of year. “Guys just battled hard,” Naurato quipped, when asked how his team had pulled it off. “Michigan can play defense.”
Star power and scoring may always be the first association with the Maize and Blue, but Sunday’s performance showed a different side to Naurato’s young Wolverines. They set the pace for themselves with defense and goaltending to allow their vaunted attack enough time to find a way to overcome a sterling performance from Souliere.
If Friday night’s rout of Colgate was a feeding frenzy, getting past Penn State on Sunday was closer to an archaeological excavation. Michigan dug, picked, and polished for fifty-two minutes before getting a definitive sign that there might be a reward for its troubles. Whether because of Naurato’s levity or Samoskevich’s ballistic wrist shot, it didn’t even take the Wolverines a minute to unearth their prize once overtime began: a date with Quinnipiac a week from Thursday in Tampa and a second straight trip to the Frozen Four.
“I’m in a really good spot,” said Brandon Naurato with a grin, when asked how he was taking in the result. “I’ve learned so much, and I don’t take any situation as negative. You can always learn from it. We told the guys at the beginning of the year that the teams that are there in the end—it’s not the most talented teams, it’s just the guys that are the closest.”
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