The BG hockey team split its weekend series with Michigan State.
The Falcons won 2-1 Friday at home and lost 3-1 Saturday on the road.
The story of the weekend was the absence of goalie Andrew Hammond. Hammond, who started eight straight games dating back to Jan. 8 against Michigan, sustained a knee injury during practice Wednesday.
How long he remains out is still unknown, although head coach Chris Bergeron said he doesn’t think it will be for an extended period of time.
“He thought this might be the way he was going to end his career at Bowling Green,” Bergeron said. “But the indications are that the next 24 hours got better. I think it’s a short-term thing. He seems to be making good strides on a daily basis.”
Freshman Tommy Burke was called into action to replace Hammond and played well, stopping 17 of 18 shots Friday night after a rocky start.
Michigan State scored on its first shot of the game, a shorthanded goal 3:28 into the first period, after Dajon Mingo turned the puck over at the offensive blue line and surrendered a breakaway to Greg Wolfe.
The Spartans had four more shots in the period, but they were all clustered in the last few minutes of the period.
“It was a tough first shot to have,” Burke said. “Then I think there was an 18 minute stretch when I only [faced] one shot on net. They had some flow into the game and had some shots attempted on net. I was seeing the puck, it just didn’t hit me.”
The Falcons answered that goal 53 seconds later when Ben Murphy scored a power play goal from a bad angle at the bottom of the left faceoff circle.
BG went ahead for good 12:25 into the second period on a goal from Ryan Carpenter. On a two-on-one rush, he received a pass from Mark Cooper and blasted a one-timer past Michigan State goalie Will Yanakeff.
“I was just coming down the slot and I knew I was wide open,” Carpenter said. “He fed a nice pass, he held on to it and made the [defenseman] come over and commit to him and I got a piece of it.”
The goal was also scored on the power play and extended Carpenter’s point streak to 13 games.
That streak would end Saturday night, as the Spartans rebounded to defeat the Falcons, 3-1.
Wolfe scored his second and third goals of the weekend— the latter being an empty netter late in the third period— and Jake Hildebrand stopped 27 of 28 shots to pick up his fifth win of the season.
Burke once again started in net for BG and stopped 15 of 17 shots.
“I think we showed our lack of experience of being able to close out a weekend,” Bergeron said. “We didn’t bring our game up a level … got off to a slow start and were ultimately not able to get on top of it.”
Wolfe opened the scoring with a power play goal midway thought the first period. The power play was a result of a five-minute major to Adam Berkle for hitting from behind.
Michigan State Tanner Sorenson made it 2-0 six minutes into the second period with his ninth goal of the season.
Bryce Williamson scored late in the second period to bring the Falcons back within one. However, despite several scoring chances, the Falcons were not able to get the equalizer on the board.
“It’s just one of those things where we didn’t deserve the bounces tonight,” Williamson said. “We had some chances to tie it up but it just didn’t happen.”
