Waterville, Maine - The Colby College Women's Hockey team challenged top-ranked Middlebury College in the first of two games this weekend.  This is a matchup the NESCAC will look forward to seeing in the post-season.  The Mules fought every second of the game and are surely going to bring the heat tomorrow against the Panthers.  Unfortunately, today the Mules lost 3-2.

The first period remained scoreless, representative of the back and forth play that put neither team above the other.  While Middlebury outshot Colby 13-11 in the first period, Colby had one power-play opportunity to the Panthers' zero. Nina Prunster started off an outstanding game with nine saves for her team, and kept the Mules in the game for all 60 minutes.

The game remained scoreless until halfway through the second period when Middlebury's Cat Appleyard.  The Mules ran into trouble when they started getting penalty after penalty and Middlebury was able to capitalize.  Middlebury had four power-play attempts and were able to score on two of them.  The Panthers had 24 shots on goal to the Mules' six.  While this was not the play seen in the first period, Colby was still able to kill half the penalties against them and Prunster tacked on 22 more saves with her defense.

What shows about the Colby team this season is that they are not a team to give up, they make adjustments as the game goes on and figure out ways to exploit their opponent's weaknesses.  Going into the third period, it was clear that the Mules made a shift in their play.  They had 12 shots on goal to the Panthers' 16 and three power play attempts, scoring on one of them.  The Mules scored their first goal at 12:56 by sophomore Meg Rittenhouse and assisted by junior Bri Michaud-Nolan, making the score 3-1.  At 18:31, Colby took Prunster out of the net to give the Mules an opportunity to score again, going to show that no one on the Mules' roster will give up before the last buzzer.  With just 12 seconds left in the game, the Mules cleaned up in front of the net and made the score 3-2.  Jillian Mazzocca scored for the Mules with an assist from McKinley Karpa.  Prunster had a stellar game with 94% save percentage with a total of 46 saves and kept the Mules in the game until the very end.

The Mules return to challenge the Panthers again at 3:00pm on Saturday January 22nd.  Colby asks that no spectators attend the games in person as we continue to deal with COVID-19.