Colorado Eagles beat Allen Americans despite controversial call by ECHL officials

Everyone stood still.

Frozen and confused. Nobody on the ice expected to keep playing. On one side or the other. Well, everybody but one.

Alex Garon. The game’s referee. His discretion all that mattered.

“The puck came to the point there and everybody stopped playing, so I stopped playing also,” Colorado Eagles forward Joey Ratelle said. “He just threw pretty much a saucer pass into the net. All 10 players stopped playing, so I don’t know what happened there.”

Moments earlier, Colorado defenseman Teigan Zahn was called for a cross-check, sending an Allen player into the crease of Eagles goaltender Lukas Hafner. Everything which played out from there was bizarre, unexpected and nearly game-altering.

Colorado went from a two-score lead to trailing, needing every bit of a stellar third period to rebound from catastrophe and claw out a slim 5-4 victory over Allen on Saturday night at the Budweiser Events Center, its fourth in a row and eighth win in the past 11 contests.

More than half of the second period had expired and the Eagles (41-16-4-2, 88 points) were rolling. Goals in each of the first two frames had staked them to a firm 2-0 advantage and nothing in Allen’s performance up to that point suggested much would change.

Until Zahn’s cross-checking infraction.

“You look in the NHL this year, that’s one of the big debates, is what is goalie interference?” Hafner thoughtfully offers afterward, taking the diplomatic approach with a smile under his backward hat. “What isn’t?”

In Garon’s opinion, this wasn’t. And his decision is final. But the building disagreed vehemently and let all know it.

Allen’s player crashed into the back of Hafner’s legs, taking the goalie to the ground well within his crease. When a defending player sends the attacker into the netminder, it isn’t considered interference. However, the two players remained tangled for several seconds following the check, leading to the confusion of all involved.

“Obviously you’re not going to agree with every call throughout the year. I definitely need to take responsibility. I definitely disagree with what happened and I got too frazzled with my emotions and lost my marbles about that,” Hafner said, giving Garon an earful in the moments after. “Usually I feel I’m pretty calm, so I just have to learn from it. Thankfully we got the win still. If I just shake it off and forget about it, we don’t have those other couple goals too. I was still a little frazzled.”

Allen (31-24-4-2, 68 points) then benefitted from an apparent misapplication of the rules, receiving a power play from Zahn’s infraction despite having scored while the delayed penalty was in effect.

“That was pretty wild, too,” Hafner said.

The Americans’ man advantage would result in the goal to pull within one score, followed by two more power-play goals and a sudden 3-2 edge all within two minutes.

“We’ll have to watch it. I haven’t had the chance to look at it again,” Eagles assistant coach Ryan Tobler said in place of head coach Aaron Schneekloth, who left immediately after the game due to illness. “Until I’ve seen it again, I can’t comment on it.

“We can’t come unraveled, no matter the circumstances, things out of our control. We can control our emotions. The resiliency of the team was outstanding. We came back and had a really good push in the third. I’m proud of the guys for that, for sure.”

Certainly the mood shifted as the second period drew to a close, all the momentum the Eagles had built up evaporated. Yet the controversy only seemed to fuel a renewed fire out of the break, rattling off three unanswered goals of their own to regain a 5-3 lead.

Two of them sparked by Ratelle.

“It felt really good. We were just hard working and we knew we had to play 60 minutes, keep battling, keep battling and eventually we’d get rewarded for it,” he said. “That’s what happened and it felt really good.”

Cris Tiller: tillerc@reporter-herald.com or twitter.com/cristiller

Eagles 5, Americans 4

At Budweiser Events Center

Allen 0 3 1 — 4