In an overtime thriller, the Dartmouth Steele Subaru Major Midgets won the Nova Scotia Major Midget Hockey League championship Saturday night.
Matthew Warner scored with 1:53 remaining in the first overtime to give Steele Subaru the 4-3 win and the championship over the top-seeded Cole Harbour Pro Hockey Life Wolfpack in the fourth game of the series.
“It was certainly a hard-fought series,” said head coach Steve Crowell. “Cole Harbour was a well-coached team and it took all of our resources to put a plan in place to try to beat them.”
The team finished the post-season with a 10-1 record, its only loss coming in Game 3 of the championship series last Tuesday.
“We rolled four lines all year and basically since the first of January our lines have been the same,” said Crowell.
“We made one adjustment in the final game . . . to add a little bit more speed to one line and that line scored our first two goals.”
With the Steel Subaru trailing in third period, Brock McLeod scored his second of the game and 10th of the playoffs to tie it and send the game to overtime.
McLeod led all payers with 21 points in the post-season, including three in the final game.
Goaltender Aiden Hosein was named playoff MVP after the game. Hosein finished the playoffs with an 8-1 record and a 1.86 goals against average.
“He battled,” said Crowell. “He made huge saves in both of the overtime games.”
Hosein broke the NSEMMHL league record of seven shutouts during the regular season earlier this season.
Steele Subaru had three players named to the all-rookie team, Evan MacKinnon, Peter Diliberatore and Andrew Coxhead.
Steele Subaru’s Jordan McKenna won the John Hanna Memorial Award as the league’s most sportsmanlike player.
The team now moves on to play in the 2016 Major Midget Atlantic Hockey Championship hosted in Conception Bay South, N.L., from March 31 to April 3, with hopes of earning a birth in the Telus Cup, the national Major Midget Championship.
“We’re excited to go and represent the province and we’re going to put our best foot forward,” said Crowell.
Crowell said his team has played three of the teams already this season and believes this might be the most competitive Atlantic Championship on paper in a while.
