BEVERLY — Anyone who went to Saturday’s Saugus-Danvers boys hockey game and walked around for the rest of the day hearing whistles probably had plenty of company. There were plenty of them. They arrived early and stayed late.
The referees whistled 23 penalties — 13 of them on the Sachems. The only problem, from the perspective of Saugus coach Jeff Natalucci, is that Danvers capitalized and his team didn’t.
“That pretty much explains it,” Natalucci said following the Falcons’ 4-0 win at the Ray Bourque Arena at Endicott College.
“I think the referees were trying, right from the start, to get control of the game,” Natalucci said.
Unlike most of the Saugus fans in the stands, Natalucci wasn’t about to blame the referees for a loss that dropped his team to 4-4-2, especially since his team had more than its share of power plays.
“We had enough opportunities to cash in, but we didn’t,” he said. “And if you’re going to beat this team, you have to do it with six players on the ice. You can’t give them any advantages.”
Despite the loss, Natalucci wasn’t totally unhappy with the way his team played. But he wasn’t thrilled with the final 15 minutes, during which the unbeaten Falcons scored three of their four goals.
“You have to play 45 minutes against this team, and we only played 30,” he said. “I liked our game in the first two periods. The defense was there, and we had plenty of opportunities.”
Saugus had its best chance to score, which would have tied the game, during a 5-on-3 stretch at the end of the second period when the Sachems basically teed off on the Falcons. But those three Danvers defenders seemed as if they were 103 strong in blocked or deflecting shots. Junior goalie Robert Prentiss turned away at least four tough shots, and the Sachems missed the net a few times for good measure as well.
“It would have been nice if we’d put one in there,” said Natalucci. “I thought we were going to.”
Danvers took the early lead with only 5:34 gone in the first period when, seconds after going on the power play, Jared Mscisz, from Conor Purtell and Matthew Taylor, scored. And that’s how it stayed through the rest of the period, and all through the middle frame that featured tremendous ebbs and flows on the part of both teams, especially depending on who had the man advantage.
Saugus was still hanging in there in the third period when Nick DiSciullo of Danvers burst in on a breakaway wit a little over two minutes gone that Sachem goalie Nicholas Sanderson corralled and smothered on his chest. Saugus seemed poised to seize on that momentum, but the opposite happened. At 4:40, after Sanderson had just turned away another point-blank shot, Thomas Mento gathered up a loose puck to Sanderson’s right and put it behind the goalie from about 10 feet out.
“I think that deflated us,” said Natalucci.
From there, the floodgates opened. Purtell, with help from Owen Desmond, made it 3-0 at 8:50, and less than two minutes after that, Tyler Puska assisted by John Kelter, closed out the scoring.