The East Williston hockey team’s season came down to the third period of a game in the state high school playoffs Saturday night Feb. 5 against East Aurora that the upstate squad led 4-1, and seemed destined to win.
But the East Williston team stepped up, kept skating hard and scored three goals in the period to draw even with East Aurora at 4-4 with just 50 seconds to go.
East Williston pulled its gutsy sophomore goalie, Graham Turk, but couldn’t score the winning goal it needed to go through to the final playoff round on Sunday – despite what coach Jon Turk described as a couple of “mad scrambles” to find the goal that proved to be just out of reach.
So the team that nobody – not even themselves – saw as much of threat going into the playoffs, finished on the brink of putting a final punctuation point on an improbable run in an exemplary post-season performance.
“If you could have a tie feel like a win, that was it,” coach Turk said. “We really were playing against some bigger and stronger teams from up north. We could not have been prouder about how they played and carried themselves up there.”
Wheatley sophomore Zack Shields, junior Joe Samuels and junior Lucas Blumenfeld had given it their best shots, scoring the three goals that brought East Williston back in that third period. And Turk had turned away 20 shots in the game to keep his team in it.
They fell short, but coach Turk is betting it’s a game they’ll remember – and build on – as they fight to get back to the playoffs next season.
“You kind of tuck this experience away for next year,” he said. “Most of the boys will be back.”
Before boarding the bus at the Wheatley School to make the trip north, the team exuded confidence about their chances.
“I feel pretty confident,” winger Joe Samuels said. “Now that we have everybody on one bench, we feel like we’ll give a good accounting of ourselves.”
After winning a junior varsity title in their division last season, the team had moved up to play against varsity teams with players that put them at a physical disadvantage.
But with the return of Shields for the playoffs after a five-game absence due to a concussion, the team certainly appeared to have hit its stride at just the right time.
Fourth-seeded going in, they knocked off top-seeded Garden City 5-2 in what goalie Turk recalled as a pivotal effort.
“Going in we really didn’t think we had a chance. Toward the end of the game, that all changed because we knew we were going to win,” Turk said.
Coach Turk said his squad was young, virtually all sophomores and juniors from Wheatley, and said they didn’t know what to expect from the teams they would face “up north.”
They maintained their new-found confidence with two straight victories against Manhasset-Roslyn after being down 2-1 in the first period of the first game.
But their game attitude showed through in their first match-up against Akron on Friday, with a winning 5-2 effort.
On Saturday, they stumbled through an early morning match-up, incurred nine penalty calls and found themselves on the short end of an 11-1 score against City Honors, a home-town team to the Buffalo arena where they were playing. A three-goal third period was the start of a comeback from too far back.
So they faced a must-win match in the 6 p.m. game against East Aurora when another three-goal comeback left them short of a trip to the semi-finals.
It was still a trip to remember.
“It far exceeded our expectations in our first year as a varsity team,” Coach Turk said. “We saw that we could play with those teams and that we belonged.”
