St. Thomas boys hockey holds off Dover to win first D2 championship

MANCHESTER - The St. Thomas Aquinas High School boys hockey team would have been happy to win a championship playing against any team.

To try to win one against their city rivals, well, that just makes it a little sweeter.

Zach Talbot and Patrick Vetter each had two goals and the No. 1 Saints made a one-goal lead hold up throughout the third period, as St. Thomas held off No. 2 Dover for a 5-3 win Saturday in the Division II championship game.

It's the program's first championship and it comes after the Saints fell short in the title game a year ago.

"There’s really no words to describe it," Vetter said. "If we were to win it, this was probably the best way to win it, and I’m glad we were able to get it done.

"We knew we had to keep going or else they’d do what they did. We just wanted to come back and recapture it after last year."

What Dover (17-4) did was rally from a 2-0 deficit to start the second period, tying the game at 2-2 with 5:46 left in the middle stanza. After getting a pep talk in the morning, St. Thomas coach Wayne Sheehan used his timeout there and tried to help the Saints (18-2) right the ship.

"I was a police chief at one time and my former prosecutor called me this morning to wish me luck," Sheehan said. "He said don’t you hold that timeout until the end of the game. You use it if you need it somewhere in the middle. That might have been the best advice I got. I called that timeout in the second period and it settled us right down.

"I talked about what our defensive responsibilities were. We were leaving the slot open. They got too many clean shots from the hash marks in, and we wanted to make sure our weakside wing was helping out the defense in front of the net. And we needed to be stronger on the walls on the breakouts. That’s what we said and we did it."

Talbot and Vetter scored 59 seconds apart to restore the two-goal lead for St. Thomas, the second of which came on a dump in from near center ice by Vetter that got by Dover goalie Austin Gilbert. The Green Wave brought in Devon Lapierre to play in net after that and he kept St. Thomas off the board the rest of the way.

"Austin played a great game and had a great season," Dover coach Mike Young said. "Both of our goalies had great seasons. We had confidence in both of our goalies.

"We just pulled Austin at that point to maybe jump start the guys. It worked. We got another one. We had a couple of good looks there in the last 15 or 20 seconds of the period. St. Thomas closed the third period out pretty well."

Dover got one of the goals back, as a shot by Douglas Gnall hit Axel Post in front of the goal, and Post was able to gather the puck, spin and get it past St. Thomas goalie Hannes Demegard to make it 4-3 with 1:58 left in the second.

Geoffrey Smith also had a goal for St. Thomas while Keegan Youngclaus, Brendan Tersolo, Will MacLean, Matt Barnes and Mathis Savard each had an assist. Demegard made 21 saves, and aside from the second period, didn't give up a goal in the tournament.

The Green Wave also got goals from Aiden McDonough and Jacob LeClerc, who scored less than two minutes apart in the second to tie the game and give Dover life.

"We just keep preaching to the guys, it’s going to be a long game and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy," Young said. "McDonough, the puck ended up on his stick in the crease, and he jammed it home. That was the first goal that Hannes had given up in the playoffs. We had a shot that found its way through traffic into the top corner, and it’s 2-2, and the boys start believing like we can get some past this kid. We knew we’d have to get traffic in front and that’d be the difference."

But St. Thomas also knew what would make the difference in its favor and was able to do so.

"We just calmed down and got everything going the way we wanted to," Vetter said. "We knew we had to be doing what we were doing at the beginning of the game. We knew what we were doing wrong and we just had to fix it."