The Barrhead Midget Steelers won the first game of the 1660 League Tier I Midget Championship in dramatic fashion defeating the Slave Lake Thunder 3-2 March 8 at home.
Less than a minute into overtime Brendan Bujold scored on a shorthanded breakaway to secure the victory.
Two days later the Slave Lake beat Barrhead to 5-3. The deciding game will take place at the Barrhead Agrena March 15 starting at 8:30 p.m.
Coach Lee Abernathy, after the home game, said while he was happy with the not only the result and effort of his players, he said the team wasn’t as sharp as they could have been, especially in the first period.
“We haven’t played a game in two weeks and we were rusty, but as the game went on we started to get more comfortable,” he said.
Originally the team had been slated to play the Fort McMurray Midget ‘A’ Junior Oil Barons in the first round, but they received a bye after the team forfeited the season,
In January, a video uploaded to Snapchat showed a boy from the Fort Junior Oil Barons banging a hockey stick against the lid of a garbage can like a drum. As music from the Indigenous electronic group A Tribe Called Red plays, two other players can be seen dancing while the rest of the team shouts and laughs.
The locker room incident went viral after it was uploaded to Facebook. The social media backlash that followed saw commenters accusing the boys of mocking Indigenous culture. Many comments included hopes the boys would die in a traffic accident, specifically mentioning the Humboldt Broncos’ team bus crash.
As it turned out, the boys involved were Indigenous, with at least one player a member of the Fort McKay Métis.
Despite the rust, the Steelers got on the scoreboard first, just short of the eight-minute mark, thanks to a goal by Siraj Assaf, assisted by Brayden Bain and Sheldon Dewsnap.
Three minutes later Slave Lake responded with a goal of their own and the period ended in a 1-1 tie.
The Thunder broke the tie, scoring a goal at the five-minute mark of the second period. The lead was short-lived when Bujold scored on a goal assisted by Colton Bondarchuck less than a minute later.
The game remained 2-2 for the rest of regulation time. However, it looked like Slave Lake might be able to win the game late in the third period when Barrhead took two questionable penalty calls. The first one for elbowing on a call that could of went either way at the 3:35 mark and a really questionable call on captain Owen Weeks for boarding with thirty-four seconds left on the clock. Weeks was given a game misconduct on the play as well, and as a result, the team went without his services in the second game.
Regardless of how the series ends up, the Steelers will be playing in the provincial championships in Strathmore starting on March 21.
