Feb. 27—As a freshman in 2018, Oakdale’s Gavin Paduzzi felt the pain of the Bears’ loss to Churchill in the Maryland Student Hockey League’s championship game.
“They destroyed us,” Paduzzi, now a senior forward for the Bears’ hockey team, recalled. “We were determined not to let that happen again.”
Since then, Paduzzi and his teammates longed for a return trip to Laurel’s Ice Gardens, the site of the MSHL championship, but Oakdale missed the Monocacy Valley League playoffs the last two years and did not qualify for the MSHL playoffs.
At the start of this season, Oakdale coach Hugh McElroy had a much different feeling about his club team.
“We had some pretty high expectations,” McElroy said. “This is such a good, solid, group of players. We felt pretty good heading into the season.”
McElroy’s feelings weren’t misguided.
Oakdale punched its ticket back to the MSHL playoffs on Wednesday with a 4-2 win over the Washington County North Stars in the Monocacy Cup championship game at Skate Frederick.
With the win, Oakdale (14-0) earned the top seed, and a first-round bye, in the MSHL playoffs, which begin next week. The Bears will automatically advance to next week’s quarterfinals.
“We’ve gotten much better,” said Paduzzi, who scored two goals in Oakdale’s win over the North Stars. “We just need to stay focused, play our game and play good defense.”
Oakdale was going to need every bit of its defense to hold off Washington County. With the Bears leading 3-1, the North Stars had a two-man advantage on the ice throughout the second half of the second period, and partially into the third, because of multiple penalties by Oakdale.
Oakdale’s defensive stand during that time was led by AJ Yuhas and freshman goalie Devin Brown. With Yuhas at the top of the Bears’ defensive setup, and Brown making clutch saves, clearing the puck away from the crease, the Bears held Washington County to one goal the rest of the way.
Once Oakdale was back up to full strength in the third period, McElroy was able to finally relax.
“AJ did such a great job at the top position,” McElroy said. “But you’ve got to have a good person in goal. It’s a blessing for us to have Devin back there for us. He’s got a lot of experience, playing a lot of travel hockey during the year. He’s the main component in our defense. We were able to kill off their power play.”
Paduzzi, who leads the team in scoring with 26 goals and 23 assists (49 points), said there’s been the issue of unnecessary penalties.
“Penalties have been our trouble all season.” Paduzzi said. “We’ve got to do a better job of cutting down the number of penalties.”
Paduzzi gave Oakdale a 1-0 lead with 12 minutes, 43 seconds to go in the first period on an assist from Cian Cassidy. Twelve seconds later, Yuhas scored on a double-assist from Peduzzi and Cassidy.
Peduzzi scored his second goal at the 6:42 mark of the second period on an assist from Yuhas. Eli Corridon-Crum had an empty-net goal for the Bears in the last 12 seconds of the game.
“Gavin has shown good leadership for us,” McElroy said.
Next, he’ll lead the Bears back to the ultimate proving ground for their team, looking for a much better result than their most recent appearance on the state stage.
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