North Stars’ season reflection

The North Stars won the SJHL championship this season before then falling in five-games to the MJHL victors, the Portage Terriers in the Anavet Cup Thursday.

While the feeling may be bittersweet right now – when looking back on the year in the coming weeks and months, the North Stars’ bench boss knows this will certainly be a memorable season for both himself and the players alike.

The road to the league championship this year was anything but a smooth sail, as the club battled injuries, a road-heavy second-half, and typical growing pains along the way that come from time to time on a team featuring a remarkable 12 rookies on the 25-man roster.

That adversity, however, is something that only appeared to help the Stars on their road to the championship, giving the team a never-say-die outlook right from the opening few weeks of the campaign.

“I think it started off right from the beginning of the year, that we’ve just been resilient right from day one,” Klimosko said. “We probably weren’t playing our best hockey at the start of the year, but we found ways to win.”

And find ways to win, the team did. After posting three-straight victories over Nipawin (twice) and La Ronge just prior to the Christmas break, the Stars’ entered their holiday layoff with a 19-9-6 record, seemingly on the upswing.

Finding their groove once again coming out of the Christmas break to ultimately going 16-4-4 over the final 24 games, the Stars’ play peaked at just the right time, entering the playoffs as the hottest team in the league.

The Stars’ 11-1-1 streak to close out the season, helped the team clinch top spot in their division in overtime of the last night of the regular season.

Entering the playoffs as the second seed overall, the Stars began their post-season with a bang, winning the opening three games of their first-round series with the offensively potent Flin Flon Bombers, with two of the team’s wins coming in overtime.

Up 3-0 in the series, in Game 4, the tides, however, appeared to change. Flin Flon proceeded to rattle off three-straight of their own, (again, with two of the games overtime decisions), to force a seventh and deciding game back in the Battlefords with the Stars at risk of squandering the series in front of the hometown crowd.

Rather than panic, the group banded together once again to pull out likely their best effort of the season in a decisive 4-1 victory to punch their ticket to Round 2.

Stars’ captain Cody Spagrud, reflected on the team’s Game 7 triumph and said bouncing back to win that seventh game was a boost to moral that stuck with the team the rest of the ride.

“I think everyone just kind of bought in and we realized we had to fight back,” Spagrud said. “We don’t really back down from things and Game 7 against Flin Flon I think was our best game of the year, which really showed we can play our game and come back to get the job done.”

In the semifinals against the Yorkton Terriers, the Stars picked up right where they had left off, seemingly growing in confidence with each passing game.

After blazing out to another 3-0 series lead for the second series straight, the team showed they made the most of their prior experience after witnessing just how quickly a series can swing.

Rather than give the opposition any kind of life on the road back, the Stars ended things in the fourth game for good, shutting out the top-ranked offence of the Terriers in three of the final four games of the sweep.

In the SJHL Finals, the Battlefords again were dealt a bout of push-back, as, after taking Game 1 by a convincing 6-2 margin, the Melfort Mustangs answered back to tie the series at a game apiece, following a 1-0 Mustangs’ win in Game 2, as the horses managed to shutout the Stars for the first time in the post-season.

Responding with a bounce-back win, and an overtime victory after that as well, the team again rattled off three-straight wins to take the Canalta Cup as SJHL champions.

Against Portage in the Anavet Cup, although the series may have gone just five games, four of the five were decided by two-goals or less, with each game, it seemed, again proving the resiliency of the Battlefords’ team.

Portage scored the first two goals of the game in each of Games 1 and 2 at Stride Place.

In the first game, the Stars came back to win the tilt in the third, and in the second, it was the North Stars again battling back to take a third period lead into the final 45 seconds of the game.

Perhaps the best example, however of the team’s go-hard or go-home approach was their performance in Game 4 Wednesday, as the Stars erased a two-goal deficit again in the third in a losing effort that remained tight to the finish.

Nineteen different North Stars scored for the team over their 16 playoff games, and additional five against Portage, making the championship effort truly an all hands-on deck performance.

*More to come on the North Stars’ season reflection throughout next week.

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Martin.Martinson@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: MartyMartyPxP1

by Martin Martinson

North Stars’ season reflection

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