WARWICK TOWNSHIP—With the demise of Thanksgiving Day high-school football, scholastic hockey, now more than ever, has become an entrenched holiday tradition, one which brings together traditional rivals.

Central Bucks East and Central Bucks West have been rivals in all sports for over half a century, since before either school fielded a hockey team. And their traditional Thanksgiving Eve shootout on ice brought with it a full measure of emotional energy.

“It’s good to get a lot of support from the fans from the respective schools,” said East coach Jeff Mitchell. “The homecoming [football] game and rivalry games aren’t too much of a thing anymore, especially since Covid, so it’s good that the league still lets us have these games and tries to make a little bit more special than the rest of them.”

West Coach Dave Baun spoke of the familiarity the players on both side have with one another.

“Many of the kids know the opponent,” he said, “because they went to Tohickon [Middle School] together. It’s a great rivalry, there are great kids on both teams, and we have a lot of fun.”

On this occasion, it was the Patriots who had the upper hand. Corey Kosick scored three goals in a span of 4 minutes, 57 seconds in the first period to pace his team to a 4-2 win in front of a full house at Revolution Ice Gardens.

It was the second win for the Patriots (3-1) over the Bucks (1-3-1) in 13 days; East won the first meeting 7-3 on November 9.

Kosick’s first goal of the night, his eighth of the season, came off a turnover when he when in on West netminder Liam Rogers essentially unchallenged. His second tally came at the 7:57 mark, he completed his hat trick just 19 seconds later.

Kosick was playing in his third East-West holiday matchup.

“I think we probably had the most people here for this year,” he said. “There was a lot of energy. It was fun to play in front of all these people because we don’t usually get that many.”

Evan Asimakopoulos made it a 4-0 game 29 seconds into the middle period but the Bucks were still hanging around, largely due to the work of Liam Rogers in goal. The senior made 26 saves over the course of the first two periods.

When Anthony Dowd and Adam Ricci scored goals 20 second apart West found itself trailing just 4-2 with a period-and-a-half of hockey remaining. But Cole Breen kept the Bucks at bay the rest of the way.

“I feel like we kind of took our foot off the gas at the start of the second period,” Mitchell said, “which kind of gave them room to kind of start getting back into the game and we took a couple of bad penalties.

“But all in all, the boys were pretty much giving 110 [percent] throughout the entire game.”

West was unable to take advantage of five power-play chances (one of them abbreviated).

“You would never guess that we worked on our power play breakout at practice on Monday,” said West coach Dave Baun. “but sometimes they have short memories.  Some of this stuff should be second nature and it’s not.”

C.B. West 0 2 0—2

C.B. East 3 1 0—4

First-period goals: Corey Kosick (CBE) unassisted, 3:19; Kosick (CBE) from Evan Asimakopoulos and Drew Trask, 7:57; Kosick (CBE) from Asimakopoulos and Trask, 8:16

Second-period goals: Asimakopoulos (CBE) from Kosick, :29; Anthony Dowd (CBW) unassisted, 12:35; Adam Ricci (CBW) from Dowd, 12:55

Shots: C.B. West 25, C.B. East 40; Saves: Liam Rogers (CBW) 36, Cole Breen (CBE) 23