One of the Tucson Roadrunners’ biggest home crowds of the 2021-22 season got something extra special on the last night of its team’s season: extra hockey, and a 3-2 shootout win to send the club and its fans into the offseason on a high note.
The Roadrunners (23-39-5-1) led Friday night’s game 2-0 through roughly the game’s first 50 minutes, before the Gulls (28-33-4-3) eventually tied it with just six seconds left in regulation.
“I think we just wanted to spend a little more time together,” Tucson coach Jay Varady said after Colin Theisen and Terry Broadhurst scored in the shootout, while Roadrunners goaltender Ivan Prosvetov turned away two San Diego attempts. “It’s like we knew this was the last game for that particular group in that room and they just wanted to go as long as possible.”
Varady clearly wasn’t intimating that his team purposely gave up two third-period goals so it could go another five minutes into overtime and then script a shootout victory. But he and his players echoed a similar sentiment to one another: The end to the season comes fast, even after 27 weekends and more than a dozen more games scattered in between.
“Tonight was exciting,” Varady said. “We were together. We were competing in a shootout.
“Tomorrow sucks. There’s no other way to put it. Cleanup day; lockers getting cleaned out. You walk in as a coach and you walk in to the locker room. There’s no equipment hanging,” he added. “that means that group is gone. They won’t ever be back together. And this group was a fun group to deal with. They came to work every day. They worked hard.”
Broadhurst, an AHL veteran who opened the scoring and walked Tucson off with his shootout marker, joined the Roadrunners a few weeks into the season on a tryout deal. He ended the year as one of the team’s alternate captains and one of the league’s cleanest players, so to speak. He carded just four penalty minutes in 49 appearances.
After a postgame mini-lap on the Tucson Arena ice carrying his young son in his arms, Broadhurst called the moments immediately following the win “bittersweet,” while citing the resolve in the Roadrunners’ locker room.
“These moments are always tough, because the group won’t be together again. You wish you could be in the playoffs playing Ontario next weekend, but it is what it is,” Broadhurst said. “I just can’t say enough good things about the character of the group. Those aren’t easy games to play and to find the energy – the find the motivation.”
But the Roadrunners clearly did find that motivation of late, especially in this week’s two-game set in Tucson Arena against the playoff-bound Gulls. A day after defeating the Gulls 6-2 Thursday, Tucson held San Diego to just nine shots on net through two periods while jumping out to a 2-0 lead.
After a scoreless first period, Broadhurst notched his 11th goal of the year to open the scoring 6:27 into the middle frame. Cole Hults and Ben McCartney were credited with assists.
Then, with less than two minutes to play in the second, Tucson captain Hudson Fasching scored his 14th goal of the year on a perfect feed from recently-signed rookie Oliver Chau. Brandon Ested picked up the secondary assist.
“Position ‘A,’” Fasching said of where he was set up in front of San Diego goaltender Lukas Dostal, waiting for the pass from Chau. “You can’t get in a better position to score. (The pass) was right on my tape. If I don’t put that in I’m crying myself to sleep at night. It was a great play by Chau to hold on to the puck. That was a crazy battle behind the net.”
But San Diego’s Bryce Kindopp scored on the power play with 9:11 to play in the third, before Josh Lopina tied the game at two with six seconds left in regulation in a 6-on-5 situation while Dostal, the Gulls’ netminder, was pulled to the bench.
In the five-minute overtime, both teams traded rare power-plays, but no score led the shootout and the ultimate Tucson season-closeout victory.
Prosvetov, who started the season with back-to-back shutouts in October, nearly ended his season the same way. San Diego’s pair of goals changed that, but no Roadrunner was higher after the shootout win than the third-year Tucson netminder.
“It’s a great feeling,” said Prosvetov, who turned away 18 of 20 San Diego attempts on goal in regulation and overtime, and both in the shootout in front of a Tucson Arena audience of 5,410 — the team’s second-largest home crowd of the season.
Prosvetov added that in terms of the show the fans got to see Friday, “to be honest, 2-0 probably would not be as (great) a feeling as it is right now.
“It’s a 3-2 shootout. Friday night. TCC. Last game of the year. It feels like the perfect movie,” he added.
