Peters Township holds off North Allegheny to again reach PIHL Penguins Cup title game

By: HSSN Staff
Thursday, March 15, 2018 | 10:09 PM

Like last year, Peters Township beat North Allegheny to reach the PIHL Penguins Cup Class 3A championship.

The Indians, who won last year's title as well as the state crown, hope history repeats itself this season. Peters Township held off the Tigers, 2-1, in Thursday night's semifinal at the RMU Island Sports Center to make its second straight trip to the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex.

“It's pretty special,” Peters Township's Mark Lehman said. “I wasn't part of the team last year. These guys looked like they had a great time last year, so I wanted to do anything I could to get them back there and repeat. It's great. I don't want to stop playing.”

The Indians cruised past the Tigers, 7-0, in last year's semifinals. They beat Central Catholic, 5-2, to claim their sixth Penguins Cup. They upset Holy Ghost Prep, 2-1, for the state championship.

“It's only step two,” Peters Township coach Rick Tingle said. “I think the deal is, we'll just go back to work. That's what I told them. We can celebrate for five minutes and then it's not really anything more than moving to the next stage.

“We know we're going to have good competition. We have to go back to the drawing board tomorrow, and we're only going to have two practices, and one of them is the day before the game, which really doesn't get you a whole lot of time. We had nine days last year. This time, we have five.”

Conner Gierlarowski's sweeping shot found the back of the net 7 minutes, 23 seconds into the first to give Peters Township a 1-0 lead.

Lehman made it a 2-0 game 1:09 later. On a two-on-one, he kept the puck and fired a shot under the crossbar.

“We came out firing,” Lehman said. “We had it going for us the first period. We knew the chances were going to come, so we just kept attacking. Those goals helped to boost that. Once we were up two, our main focus was to play defense, and we got it done.”

North Allegheny (12-8) got on the board with Tyler Lamark's power-play goal with 2:52 left in the second period. Battling in a crowd in front of the net, Lamark jammed the puck in for the tally.

That was all the Tigers got, though, as goaltender Alex Wilbert and the Indians shut out North Allegheny in the third. Wilbert finished with 20 saves.

Joe Sager is a freelance writer.

Tags: North Allegheny, Peters Township