In a post game interview after the Canadian Men’s hockey team mounted a comeback win over Finland to secure a spot on the Olympic gold medal game, Connor McDavid said the team’s penchant for close games and nailbiting finishes had been putting the fans back home through a pair of stressful watching experiences.
Indeed, any Canadian hockey fan would agree that watching the country’s team battle it out against rival nations on the world’s biggest stage, scratching and clawing for goals and powering back-to-back comebacks has not been the most stress free viewing experience.
So, several hours after Canada beat Finland in the Olympic semis, when fans entered the rink on Friday to watch the Cochrane Generals take on the Wheatland Kings in game four of the second round of the Heritage Junior Hockey League (HJHL) playoffs, their nervous systems were already accustomed to the fraught energy a close winner-take-all playoff game induces.
In what ended up being the deciding game in the second round series between the Generals and the Wheatland Kings, the Generals faithful showed up en masse. Nearly 500 people packed the stands of the SLS Centre to watch the Generals pick up the win and secure their first appearance in the HJHL South Division finals since 2017.
Four different Generals scored to lift them over the Kings 4-2 to take the best of five series in four games. Emmet Long, Tyler Auger, Alexander Devnich, and Evan Sine registered the Generals scores, helping the team pull away from the Kings and closing out a series that–barring a 7-1 Generals scoring bonanza in game two–was a close matchup from start to finish.
Games one and three in Strathmore were decided by one goal a piece, including a Generals overtime winner in game three. Fans at the SLS Centre anticipated a close game for the series fourth matchup, and they got it.
The home crowd was lively, rowdy even. Fans pounded the glass and whoop and hollered with big hits, were brought to their feet and roared with each goal, and enthusiastically empowered the referees to make calls when there were none.
But by the third period, with the game tied at two, the intensity in the rink fell into a nervous energy. After the Generals scored twice and forced the Kings to the brink of elimination, the air felt tight. No one wanted to count the game finished just yet, not until the end was fully in sight.
To give the Kings credit, they did not go quietly. The Generals were out shot by nearly a dozen opportunities, and Isaias Maddigan, the Generals goaltender, had his best performance of the playoffs, making 40 saves to secure the team’s third straight win, and earning himself the game’s first star.
In their first appearance in the HJHL’s Southern finals in nearly a decade (the Generals made the North Division finals in 2022) the Generals will face either the Medicine Hat Cubs, who finished in first place in the South, or the Okotoks Bisons, who have won three HJHL league champions in a row.
The Cubs lead their series 2-1 and take on the Bisons on Saturday night. The Generals third round playoff schedule will be released once the series between the Cubs and Bisons is wrapped up.
