By Karen Sangillo
It was fast paced and action packed.
And when it was over, sixth seed Central Bucks South was a 4-3 winner over No. 11 Downingtown East in Tuesday’s opening round of the Flyers Cup Class AA tournament at Hatfield Ice Arena.
The Titans will take on third seed Council Rock South, a 6-3 winner over No. 14 Spring-Ford, in Thursday’s quarterfinals at Hatfield.
CB South got a pair of late goals in the first period. The Titans were on what had been a rather lackluster power play when Nolan Senigo netted the first goal of the evening. Ryan Montagna followed with a second goal less than 30 seconds later to send CB South into the first intermission with a 2-0 lead.
That lead was cut in half early in the second period when Downingtown East’s Chase McKeown scored. Montagna answered with his second goal of the evening to give CB South some breathing room, but the Cougars found the net in the final minutes of the period to again cut the CB South lead to one goal.
Montagna completed a natural hat trick six minutes into the third period. That goal went from an insurance goal to the game winner when Franciscus scored for Downingtown East with less than five minutes to go.
“It was definitely not a given,” said Montagna, a senior left wing. “Every single shift we had to work hard. They definitely could have come back on us.”
The Titans are very familiar with their next foe, CR South.
“I think we’ve had a great couple of games,” Montagna said. “We beat CR South twice, and we had a good game against North Penn for the championship of our league. We didn’t play our best tonight. We need to change our defense a bit and get pucks deep. We were playing around with the puck too much we need to be simple with it.”
Nathan Napolitano was in goal for the Titans and he withstood a late charge by the Cougars as the final seconds ticked down. In the first period, Napolitano came up big with a save on a Downingtown East breakaway.
“Nathan bailed us out,” said Slobodrian, a senior right winger. “It’s been the same story. He’s been bailing us out. we need to fix some things on D.
“We did a good job of drawing penalties, but we need to capitalize on them more. We only scored on one of them. We had a good amount of shots and at times we had quality shots but I think some of those could have been better.
“We need to step up our game and fix things on defense, tweak a few things on offense and also on the power play.
“When we scored those first two goals we let off the gas. I guess we thought the goals were going to be handed to us, then they scored and we realized ‘OK, were actually in a hockey game’ and we knew we had to pick it up. We had some lapses, but we did it.”
Downingtown East 0 2 1—3
CB South 2 1 1—4
First-period goals: Nolan Senigo (CBS) from Joseph Slobodrian and Ryan Frey, 14:24; Ryan Montagna (CBS) from Owen Frey, 14:50; Second period goals: Chase McKeown (DE) unassisted, 2:31; Montagna (CBS) from Slobodrian and John Lord, 6:50; Thomas Wolf (DE) from Colin Franciscus and Leonardo Nino, 15:17; Third period goals: Montagna (CBS) from Slobodrian and Ryan Frey, 5:57; Franciscus (DE) from Wolf, 12:23
Shots: Downingtown East 27, CB South 47; Saves: Lucas Fleuty (DE) 32, Nathan Napolitano (CBS) 20
