Rest assured that the Londonderry High School ice hockey team won’t want to remember its first game of 2015 for too long.
After posting a solid, 2-1 record in the annual Blue Devil Holiday Classic in Salem after Christmas, coach Peter Bedford’s Lancers bounded back into Division I action Saturday, Jan. 3, to get 2015 rolling. But the LHS skaters did very little rolling and something much more akin to coasting much of the way in a disappointing, 4-0 loss to the struggling Bishop Guertin Cardinals of Nashua on that opponent’s home sheet of ice at the Skate 3 Arena in Tyngsboro, Mass.
Coach Gary Bishop’s boys came into that first game of the new year having lost five of their first six games, including all three of the contests they played at the prestigious Mount Saint Charles Tournament in Rhode Island, in which they play every December.
But the Guertin icemen – powered in part by significant contributions from Londonderry residents Tom Norton and Jordan Caito – were unquestionably the better team in the Jan. 3 contest as they moved to 2-2 in D-I while making Londonderry 2-1 in the league.
Sophomore goalie Norton turned aside 20 Londonderry shots in helping Guertin to the shutout, and his fellow Londonderry resident and sophomore Caito potted the second goal of the game a little more than three minutes into the second period to make the score 2-0.
The host Cardinals sored the only goal they’d wind up needing to win this contest – on the third consecutive shot of a quick barrage on LHS goalie Cody Baldwin – a mere 1:01 after the opening faceoff.
Play stayed even soon thereafter, with the Lancers putting some pressure on BG keeper Norton. But the score remained at 1-0 despite the fact that the squads combined for a tally of 22 shots on net (12 for BG, 10 for LHS) in the stanza.
However, Guertin flat-out owned the second period, putting 20 shots on goalie Baldwin to Londonderry’s three shots on Norton. The hosts only scored once on Caito’s marker, and thanks to their keeper’s efforts, the locals were still in the fray as the third period commenced.
The only goals netted in the third were claimed by BG, and Bedford and his Lancer guys had plenty to consider as they rolled back over the Massachusetts border.