BRANTFORD – Throughout the first period Sunday afternoon, it looked like there would be a Game #6 in the Allan Cup Hockey League finals between the visiting Dundas Real McCoys and the Brantford Blast at the Civic Centre.
The McCoys went ahead 1-0 with Randy Rowe’s unassisted stinger, 24 seconds into the game. At 7:41, Adam Deleeuw stripped a Brantford defenseman of the puck and sped in alone on Brett Leggat to deliver the 2-0 goal.
The McCoys were beating Brantford at the net and along the boards. Right after the game started, the McCoys’ Jay McKee tried to imprint Blast’s Chad Spurr onto the boards with a check you could hear all the way back in Dundas. That set the pace and the McCoys kept hitting while building a two-goal lead over the first 20 minutes.
McKee is a big and solid defenseman who has appeared in more than 800 NHL games for Buffalo, Pittsburg and St. Louis. He retired from “the bigs” at the end of the 2009-10 season with 21 goals, 104 assists, 125 points, and 622 penalty minutes.
Maybe it was a little too easy for the McCoys in the first period because it looked like a completely different game from then on.
Joel Prpic scored first for the Blast at 1:30, assisted by Mike Burgoyne and Brandon Dietrich.
Prpic spent some time with the Boston Bruins before crossing the water to play for Austria’s Zagreb Medvascak of the KHL. At the end of the 2011-2012 season, he retired and came back to Canada.
Mike Ruberto evened the game 21 seconds later, from Dave Russell and Jon Jankus.
The McCoys continued to falter in the third period, as Kyle Spurr, Prpic’s second, and Chris Rebernik all added goals in the middle period while Leggat closed the door to lead 5-2. Cam Sault assisted on Rebernik’s goal which made it 6-2 at 1:07 and Mike Ruberto added another at 7:28.
“I thought we played pretty well in the first period, we just made a couple of bad mistakes,” said playing coach Mike Burgoyne, a former Brantford Golden Eagle. “We just had to refocus. We knew what we had to do and we did it.”
Dundas scored two late goals, but it wouldn’t change the outcome. The Brantford Blast won the game 7-4, along with the Ontario Hockey Federation’s Cup, The Allan Cup Hockey Trophy for the playoffs, and the Robertson Cup as the Ontario Hockey Association Sr. A-AAA Championship Trophy. That leaves just one more to get – the Allan Cup as Canada’s top Sr. A hockey team. The winner of the 2013-14 Allan Cup will be decided beginning April 14-19, in Dundas.
The best Sr. A-AAA Sr. Hockey teams from across Canada, from BC to Newfoundland, will come to Dundas to play for the most prestigious Sr. Hockey trophy in Canada.
