It was a scene that would make Chip Kelly cringe.
When Alex Sulitzer’s goal found the net in overtime on Saturday night, the Oregon hockey bench exploded onto the ice in celebration as the iconic winner’s anthem, Queen’s “We Are The Champions,” blared through the speakers at the Lane County Ice Center.
Technically, the Ducks had just won a regular-season game. Only really, they hadn’t — they’d won so much more.
The win gave Oregon a 3-1 series win against archrival Washington and brought the I-5 Cup back to Eugene after three-straight years of Husky victories.
“It feels great,” sophomore goalie Danny Cockriel said. “It was a little close at the end, but it feels great to win it.”
It was the first I-5 Cup win for all but one of the Ducks, and for the seniors who have lost to Washington year after year, often facing hostile crowds in Seattle, winning makes it all worth it.
“Three years in a row,” captain Patrick Thornton said. “We’ve been battling, we’ve been losing, to come out on the opposite side tonight and win the I-5 Cup, three victories out of four, we’ll take that every day of the week. We battled really hard, and I’m just really proud with how we competed today.”
Second-year head coach Rich Salahor was equally proud.
“It feels great,” Salahor said. “I think the boys deserved it, we played well and (the I-5 Cup) deserves to be in our locker room.”
For Dan Effinger, the team’s lone fifth-year player, the win brought things full circle. The Ducks last won the I-5 Cup in Effinger’s freshman year, and he says it was much sweeter the second time around.
“This one was a lot more of a battle than the one in the past,” he said. “The one we won my freshman year, we controlled pretty much every game. I think we swept them in the series. But this one means a lot more, we battled through a lot of adversity in this one, and the way it ended in OT on the power play, it was just awesome.”
Oregon now has a long layoff before they return to action on Jan. 11 on the road against Pac-8 powerhouse Utah.
“We gotta stick to our gameplan,” Salahor said. “We just need to perfect our gameplan and we need to minimize our mistakes. If we keep doing that, we’ll be fine. We’ll be successful.”@@nameschecked@@