Yankees (um, RoughRiders) knock off Green Bay

CEDAR RAPIDS - You just can't beat the Cedar Rapids Yankees.

The Yankees capped off one impressive weekend by knocking off the USHL's top team, the Green Bay Gamblers, 2-0, last night before a packed house of 3,645 fans at The Stable.

Of course, they're not really the Cedar Rapids Yankees. The Cedar Rapids RoughRiders just looked like them for two games with special dark blue and white pinstriped uniforms.

The unis were part of an ALS awareness promotion and auctioned off last night to benefit ALS research. RoughRiders head coach Mark Carlson is a huge Yankees fan and his father, Robert, passed away from what's also commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig Disease.

The sweaters all had Robert Carlson's initials on them: RLC. They were officially retired after a 2-0 record, considering the Riders beat the highly touted Team USA U-18 team Friday night.

“To be hard, sometimes it's hard to think about it,” Mark Carlson said. “As I explained to my team, there are so many terrible diseases. ALS is the only one, as far as I know, where there's no cure.”

Cedar Rapids (33-16-3, 69 points) handed Green Bay just its ninth regulation loss in 53 games, getting a 29-save shutout from Cody Campbell. To celebrate the big victory postgame, goalie Troy Grosenick threw an imaginary pitch to Campbell at center ice, who swung and knocked it out of the park.

Friday night, the duo did an imaginary pitch and catch.

"Troy and I thought about it yesterday with the pitch and catch thing," Campbell said. "We went to dinner last night and said we had to come up with something better."

Peter Sakaris scored the Riders' first goal at 1:29 of the second period with a neat deflection of a David Boehm shot. Boehm got an empty netter in the final 10 seconds.

This was a tremendous, up-and-down, physical game between opponents who seem to have developed a real dislike for one another and who could meet up eventually in next month's USHL playoffs.

Here are videos of between-periods hockey of tiny players. Awesome stuff.