It's another frustrating end to the post season for the Yorkton Harvest. It came along on Monday night. The nemesis was the same as it was last year.
It has to be hard to watch your team go down in defeat against a team that seems to have your number. Like when the team that according to the final regular season standings, is the underdog, loses to the favourites. The games for the most part are tight, but there are some momentum issues here and there.
It might actually be easier if it's a blowout win/loss; then at least you know well before the game is over that it is actually over.
Whenever the Toronto Maple Leafs used to play Detroit in the Stanley Cup playoffs (except one year that Doug Gilmour and Wendel Clark both played), you always had a pretty good idea who was going to win those games.
What made those losses even harder to watch was that Detroit always used to win the elimination game by a 3-0 final score.
Sometimes however they smoked Toronto badly.
Detroit had Toronto's number most of the time. They would shut them out almost every time. Nobody in Toronto (or Hamilton) was ever too fond of Detroit netminder Glenn Hanlon.
By comparison to the National Hockey League, the Harvest are starting to turn into the Leafs when it comes to Harvest vs the Mintos in the playoffs.
Almost ended in that exact same score too.
The Leafs (Harvest) play well enough to win the game. They get some amazing goaltending when they need it. Back then it was someone like Ken Wregget or maybe Allan Bester. For the Harvest on Monday night, it was Kale Thomson. Thomson faced 14 shots in the second period and stopped all but one. Yorkton still lost 3-1.
Weird was the celebration (or lack of it) upon the conclusion of the game. Minto's goaltender Dawson MacAuley seemed like he was trying to start a little party out there with his teammates, unfortunately none of them seemed the slightest bit interested in joining in??
The Mintos are one of only three teams in the Saskatchewan Midget AAA league to play 41 games and lose less then 10 of them.
Maybe the rest of his teammates have very high hopes of dominating the playoffs too?
Their goals-for this season was over 160. On Monday vs Thomson and the Harvest, they scored once in that second period off a point-blank break.
The other similarity to the Leafs is that they would at no point at all be out of this game.
They took as many shots as the other team but for whatever reason, not enough of them found the back of the net.
Following the game, there are always a ton of reporters asking whoever the poor schmuck is that happens to be the Leafs' coach at the time, what it was he felt went wrong. You may never see that kind of media horde at Farrell Agencies Arena but you will now and then see a coach who does not say a whole heck of a lot...usually because they can't believe they didn't win the game it was so close.Usually it's so easy to just sit there and throw a ton of questions at the coach but on games like this, even the journalist runs out of stuff to ask.
There had been an earlier possibility that the Yorkton AAAs could have played against the Saskatoon Contacts, a team that Yorkton knocked around quite a bit in the regular season. There didn't seem to be one person on Yorkton that would have had any problems playing a team they knew they had Saskatoon's number.
Maybe next year?
If there's anything you'd like to see covered by Game 7, please forward your suggestions to the Yorkton This Week sportsdesk by phone (306) 782-2465 or email me at jeff@yorkton this week.com
