Coquitlam's Wesley Berg, shown at left during a regular season contest against the PoCo Saints, led the Minto Cup scoring race by posting 24 points in six games. Berg scored twice in both games of the championship series against Orangeville.
Photograph by: Coquitlam NOW , file
COQUITLAM - History was not kind to the Coquitlam junior Adanacs on Saturday.
Playing in the best-of-three Minto Cup final, the A's were looking to repeat what they had done in 2010 by sweeping the Orangeville Northmen to claim national lacrosse supremacy.
Instead, the Northmen flipped the script and cruised to a 9-4 win to take the Canadian championship via a two-game sweep that began with Friday night's 19-6 series-opening win.
Though the Adanacs were up 3-1 at the beginning of the second, Orangeville rallied by rattling off five straight to close out the second and two more early in the third before Coquitlam could respond.
Wesley Berg's goal four minutes into the third was the lone glimmer of hope on the offensive side of the ball for the Adanacs, but it wasn't nearly enough.
Orangeville's Bill Hostrawser closed the game out with the 9-4 tally at the 16:28 mark.
Outside of Berg's pair of goals, Reid Reinholdt and Ben McIntosh also scored for Coquitlam, while netminder Davide DiRuscio made 57 saves on 66 shots.
Though the shot totals ended up at 46 apiece during Friday's opener, the game followed a decidedly different storyline.
The Northmen were up 4-0 by the end of the first, and 10-2 headed into the third. The third period saw the national champions fire nine more past the Coquitlam netminding tandem of DiRuscio and Riley Camazolla. The Adanacs responded with four goals of their own in the final frame, but the damage was done.
Berg, who claimed the tournament scoring title with 24 points in six games, potted a pair in the loss, while Church, McIntosh, Vincent Ricci and Cole Shafer netted singles. DiRuscio made 19 saves on 28 shots in just over 33 minutes worth of work, while Camazolla turned aside eight of the 18 shots he faced in the remaining 27 minutes of the contest.
Coquitlam's time at the Minto began with a tournament-opening 9-5 loss to the Northmen on Aug. 18, though the club rebounded with a commanding 12-2 win over the Calgary Mountaineers one day later. The Adanacs then split a pair of contests with the Whitby Warriors - a 17-8 loss on Aug. 21 followed by a 15-11 win the next day - to advance to the championship final.
More to come.
