The Spartans couldn’t overcome the nation’s second best scoring defense and fell to Union 3-1 in the East Regional of the NCAA Tournament. With the loss, the Spartans were eliminated from the tournament, and Union moves on to play the winner of Massachusetts-Lowell and Miami (Ohio).

Even with the weight of his team’s loss in mind, head coach Tom Anastos said the game came down to capitalizing on chances, and the Spartans weren’t able to do that Friday afternoon.

“The game was played pretty much as we expected,” Anastos said. “We expected it would be a very tough game to find space, very difficult for us to create scoring chances, and I thought they had a good power play and certainly played how we thought they would play.

“We lost the game to a very good team. The difference was they took advantage of some mistakes that we made, and they scored and on some good opportunities that we had, we weren’t able to do that.”

Scoreless in the first period, the Spartans were forced to shorten the bench near the midway point of the period after losing junior forward Dean Chelios to a game misconduct penalty. Chelios hit Union forward Daniel Ciampini from behind, and it crumpled him to the ice, effectively ending Chelios’ afternoon and giving the Dutchmen a five-minute power play.

“The biggest impact initially was we had to kill off a five-minute power play by an awfully good team that has a good power play,” Anastos said. “So that takes tons of energy, which we did. … The other thing it did, is it impacted our lines. We’ve been playing pretty regularly of late with four lines, and it’s difficult to do so we had to move guys around.”

Though a mostly scoreless first period, forward Max Novak netted the game’s first goal to give the Dutchmen the lead. With the teams skating four-on-four after forward Daniel Carr picked up an interference call, Novak picked up the puck on a pass in the neutral zone and beat sophomore goalie Will Yanakeff on a shot from the right circle at 15:09 to go ahead 1-0.

Late in the first, freshman forward Matt Berry took advantage of a scramble in front of the net and put in a highly-debated goal by Union goalie Troy Grosenick. However, a review of the play concluded that the net was dislodged when the puck went in, and it was not ruled a goal.

The no-goal call perhaps turned the tide in the game but the team was prepared to come back from it, junior forward Anthony Hayes said.

“The refs here did a great job – they said they looked at it from every possible angle, so we trust them to make the decision,” Hayes said. “That’s why they’re out there. We knew when they took as long as they did (to decide), it was going to be a close call. But, we were preparing to handle it either way that it happened.”

The Dutchman’s leading scorer forward Jeremy Welsh increased the lead early in the second period with his 26th goal of the season. Welsh put back a rebounded shot by forward Kyle Bodie at 3:20 to increase the lead to 2-0.

With 38.7 seconds remaining in the period, freshman forward Matt Berry buried a big shot to bring the Spartans within a goal. Following a three-on-none opportunity missed by the Dutchmen, Berry took advantage at the other end of the ice and scored on Grosenick to head into the locker room trailing, 2-1.

Any comeback effort was staved off by Welsh late in the third period. With the Dutchmen on the power play, Welsh sent the kill shot by Yanakeff with 1:18 to play to increase the lead and eventually eliminate the Spartans from the NCAA Tournament.

“I know our work ethic was there, our effort was there,” Hayes said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t capitalize on a few of the grade-A chances we had. Take no credit away from them, their goalie played great.

“Their defense is top-notch; we all knew that coming in. But I’m sure once we look back, we’ll be able to find a few things we could have done better. As of right now, we put forth the effort and unfortunately, we came up a little short.”