FRASER, Mich. – For the fifth straight season, the Metro Jets have earned the opportunity to play for a national championship.
With a 3-1 win Saturday night over the Lansing Wolves at Fraser Hockeyland, the Jets advance to Boston to compete with 15 other teams for the big prize March 9-12.
In the clinching victory on home ice, Nick Ceccarini, Rhett Limback and Tyler German (pictured) scored, while Fredrik Meurling finished with 24 saves.
“It was a tough game as expected,” said Jets coach-GM Justin Quenneville. “Closeout games are always the hard ones and we knew they’d push and come out hard early, and they did. We had a little stalemate there and guys were getting frustrated, but at the end of the day, we stuck to the game plan and got rewarded for it.
“Our special teams were huge tonight, which was the difference. Obviously, we got the big saves we needed from Freddy and timely goals to put us up when we needed it.”
Noah Pipper scored Lansing’s goal and Jeremy Skaife made 31 saves in goal in suffering the defeat.
Next up: Boston.
“We’ll give the guys a couple days off and focus on just getting healthy here,” said Quenneville. “We’ll touch on what we need to this week to get ready for the weekend. We still don’t know who we’re playing or the full format other than the round robin on Saturday and Sunday. It gives us a chance to regroup and get back to basics.
“Obviously, we’re excited for the trip, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us and we’ll go from there.”
Also Saturday night, Andrew Shore scored and Will Augustine made 38 saves as the MJDP Team lost Game 1 of its playoff series 4-1 to the Pittsburgh Vengeance at the Alpha Ice Complex.
Game 2 is scheduled for Sunday morning at 10:10 a.m. and the game will be streamed on www.HockeyTV.com.
