RoughRiders beat Sioux City in shootout, 4-3 [w/video]

CEDAR RAPIDS - Call it the Luck of the Irish.

Not that there's any last names on this Cedar Rapids RoughRiders team that bring immediate thoughts of Ireland. But there was no way a hockey club wearing green was going to lose on St. Patrick's Day, right?

The RoughRiders scored twice in the third period, then won a seven-player shootout to topple Sioux City, 4-3, last night before 2,413 fans at The Stable. This might not have been the best game Cedar Rapids has played the past couple of months, but it found a way.

“Yeah, you could look at it that way,” said David Boehm, whose spin-o-rama shootout goal was a highlight of Cedar Rapids' 4-3 shootout victory. “Sometimes you get a great test of adversity. We did a good job of responding to that adversity in the third period.”

The Riders (34-16-3, 71 points) trailed going to the final 20 minutes, 3-1, but got goals from Jayson Megna and Eric Robinson to send it to extra time. Robinson's tying goal at the 10:59 mark came on a one-timer from the circle that broke his stick.

Cedar Rapids faced a loss in the shootout, too, trailing, 3-2, but sixth shooter Cason Hohmann scored to tie it. Winning goalie Troy Grosenick stopped Sioux City's seventh attempt, and Jayson Megna beat Musketeer goalie Matt Skoff with a pretty curl-drag-and-roofed-shot effort to send the crowd home happy.

“I say this all the time. Sometimes you win games and you don't play great, even though people think you played great,” said Riders Coach Mark Carlson. “Then something happens that's not great, and people think you're playing poorly. You know what I mean?”

That something happens thing hit the Riders just 2:34 into the first period, when an innocuous-looking wrist shot by defenseman Kevin Gravel a smidgen inside the blue line found the net past a screened Grosenick. A too-many-men penalty a short time later led to another goal and a 2-0 Sioux City lead.

Boehm scored 32 second later to make it 2-1, but a second-period goal from Adam Schmidt restored Sioux City's two-goal edge and made it appear this simply wasn't Cedar Rapids' night.

“Somehow a puck goes in from the blue line,” Carlson said. “Then we had a change situation, and they get a power-play goal. But I didn't think that we came out poorly at all.

“I thought in the second period when they had a 3-1 lead, we weren't as good as we needed to be.”

Cedar Rapids has the best goal differential in the USHL in the third period.

“I think it's our conditioning,” Carlson said, whose team hosts rival Waterloo on Saturday night.

Here are videos of the shootout and a fight between Jeff Costello of the Riders and Ryan Carpenter of Sioux City: