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Leading a hockey game by two or three goals is the ideal way to secure a victory, but not necessarily when it comes to the University of Minnesota-Duluth women’s hockey team this season.
UMD split a pair of narrow decisions against North Dakota last weekend, starting with a Saturday afternoon game in which the Bulldogs snatched defeat from the jaws of victory -- blowing a 3-0 lead accumulated through the first half of the game in the face of a 4-goal North Dakota rally through the second half, and leaving North Dakota secure in third place with a 4-3 victory.
UMD coach Shannon Miller was livid after that game. “I was born with killer instinct,” Miller said. “So I can’t understand how players can work to get a 3-goal lead, then stop moving their feet. We just stopped moving. That’s the theme for this group, and we’ve got to figure it out.”
   It looked, however, as though Miller’s harsh words might have the reverse impact on her Bulldogs Sunday afternoon, when the teams battled through a scoreless first period but UMD fell behind 2-0 on goals by Andre Dalen and Becca Kohler in the second period. But almost like a mirror image of the first game, the Bulldogs trailed 2-0 at 10:56 of the second period and then reversed things.
Freshman Ashleigh Brykaliuk rushed up the slot short-handed at 11:38 of the middle period, pulled up, and fired a wrist shot past goaltender Lexie Shaw and in off the crossbar.
That seemed to be it for the Bulldogs, however, as they couldn’t get the equalizer through the rest of the second period and 16 minutes of the third. Then Emma Stauber fired a shot from center-point that Hannah Bramm deflected in and UMD had a 2-2 tie.
The teams battled through a scoreless overtime, as Kayla Black made 7 saves to keep it 2-2, which meant the teams would go to a shootout.
Meghan Huertas was stopped by Shaw, but Black countered by blocking Kohler’s attempt. Brykaliuk came out next for UMD, rushed in and threw a deke at Shaw before cutting to her forehand to score. But Andrea Dalen responded with a goal on Black, and the shootout was squared at 1-apiece. Next up came Jenna McParland, who has rejuvenated an inconsistent season since Miller moved her back to defense, raced in and made another neat change of direction, deking one way then scoring with a forehand as she sped past the net.
That put all the pressure on goaltender Kayla Black, and she came through, stopping Josefine Jakobsen’s attempt, and UMD celebrated a hard-earned shootout victory.
The Bulldogs have had an inconsistent season, but have fourth place - and the final home-ice spot for the WCHA playoffs - secured. They did, however, have a chance to overtake third-place North Dakota last weekend at AMSOIL Arena. If killer instinct, or the lack thereof, prevented the Bulldogs from hanging on to a substantial 3-0 lead in the first game, they did charge back from that 2-0 deficit in the second game and earn a second point with the shootout.
“We definitely played well for 60 minutes, no matter what the score was,” said Miller, after the second game. “I told the players that the important thing was to stay focused and bear down. I feel we could have won in regulation. But I’m extremely pleased we responded and did what we had to do.
“We seemed to be OK when we were losing 2-0, but God forbid we would be leading 2-0.”
And that seemed to sum up the strangest split of the season. The Bulldogs now are idle for a week, then finish the regular season at Minnesota.

OLYMPIC WOMEN SHOWDOWN

The women’s hockey programs of Team USA and Canada just don’t get it. It is impressive that they seem to be trying to elevate the quality of play among other countries, because they’ve been alerted that the International Olympic Committee isn’t interested in putting on a hockey tournament when the foregone conclusion is that two of the teams - Canada and the U.S. - will play for the Gold Medal. Every four years.
There has been only one time in the five years there has been a women’s Olympic hockey tournament when the U.S. and Canada didn’t meet for the gold. That was in 2006, when Sweden, and 16-year-old goaltender Kim Martin, stunned the U.S. in the semifinals before losing to Canada. The U.S. upset Canada at Nagano, Japan, in the first women’s gold medal game, and since then, Canada had not lost a single Olympic game until this 2014 Olympic games in Sochi, Russia.
But the U.S. and Canada have such tunnel vision for playing each other in the finale that their entire focus is on that match-up, rather than what is good for women’s hockey. Both the U.S. and Canada centralize their teams -- putting them together in the fall and keeping them intact to practice and play all season, while the rest of the hockey-playing nations don’t do that. They let their women players attend college or play in amateur leagues all season, then assemble them just before the games.
So despite how much help the U.S. and Canada offer Russia, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Japan or Germany, the U.S. and Canada widen the gap between themselves and the rest of the nations by playing together all season. If they didn’t bother doing that, there’s a chance the other countries might close the gap.   That means in their zeal to beat each other, Canada and the U.S. might ultimately be responsible for women’s hockey to be dropped from the Olympics. The same thing happened in softball and baseball, which we in the U.S. disagreed with, but nobody could compete with the U.S. in those sports.
Incidentally, it’s fun to watch Iya Gavrilova score for Russia, and Pernilla Winberg to score for Sweden, while Kim Martin stars in goal for Sweden, and Jennifer Harss plays in the nets for Germany. All of them were stars at UMD, as were Canadian captain Caroline Ouellette, and winger Haley Irwin.
Here’s how the women’s medal round will unfold: The U.S., Canada, Finland and Switzerland were all in Group A, while Sweden, Russia, Germany and Japan were in Group B. After a full round-robin, climaxed by Wednesday night’s U.S.-Canada battle, the top two in Group A advance to the semifinals. That would be the U.S. and Canada. The third and fourth teams in Group A (Finland and Switzerland) then advance to play the top two teams from Group B (Sweden and Russia), with those winners going against the U.S. and Canada, while the bottom two Group B teams are finished.
As the men’s Olympic tournament unwinds, there is an odd circumstance with the teams divided into four pools of four teams. After round-robin play, the top two in each of the four pools advance to form a quarterfinal to start the medal round. So when the U.S. plays Russia, it is only for seeding, because both teams will undoubtedly advance to the medal round.
I believe that tournament is wide-open, with most NHL fans favoring Canada, and many picking the U.S. I think that Sweden, Russia and Finland have excellent shots to surprise everybody, particularly because they will be playing on the familiar 200-by-100 international ice sheets, rather than the congestion-filled 200-by-85 foot NHL rinks. Going from a larger rink to a smaller one is easy, but adjusting from the up and down style of the narrow rinks to the wide Olympic sheets at Sochi could be a difficult adjustment.