Dale Sullivan scored at 15:54 of overtime to give the Clarenville Cariibous a 3-2 win Friday night over the Grand Falls-Windsor Cataracts in Game 3 of The Telegram Herder Memorial Championship Series and a 2-1 lead in the best-of-seven provincial senior hockey final.
The game was played before an estimated 1,000 fans at the Pepsi Centre in Corner Brook.
Despite a litany of penalty calls and resulting power plays, superb goaltending by Yetman of the Cataracts and Jason Churchill of the Caribous had kept the game scoreless until midway through the third. That's when Steven Yetman of Clarenville opened the scoring with the Caribous on a five-on-three power play.
Yetman's goal came at 12:20. All the other markers in the contest came in flurry that began just over four minutes later when Chad Earle put the Cataracts on the scoresheet. Seventeen seconds after that, at 16:42, Grand Falls took the lead on a Matt Quinn marker, but only 15 more seconds had ticked off when Dustin Russell of Clarenville tallied, making it three goals in 42 seconds and creating the necessity for overtime.
Game 4 will go 7:30 p.m. tonight at the Pepsi Centre, with Game 5 set for 2 p.m. in the same building.
Listen Up. Your comment about team executives present at an HNL meeting where this decision was made is a complete fabrication. No such meeting ever took place. The teams never agreed to hold Herder Games at the bigger venues because they thought there would be more revenue. The deicsion was made unilaterally by HNL over and above objections from the teams. The ONLy thing you are right about is that it backfired....just like some teams said it would.