Hockey East quarterfinals: Connecticut 4, Northeastern 1

Trends unexpectedly changed in a hurry Saturday, much to the delight of one pack of Huskies, not so much for another.

Roly poly rookies for the duration of February, Connecticut pups Kelly Horan and Elisabeth Stathopolous both splashed their monthlong scoring droughts at the best possible time. Their goals, both executed by way of depositing their own rebound, sandwiched that of junior Brittany Murphy to constitute a three-strike firestorm all within 85 seconds early in first period.

Accordingly, the host Northeastern team reeled in Leah Sulyma, their masked Mademoiselle of Momentum heading into the postseason, and installed Swiss starlet Florence Schelling with a mere 7:22 off the clock and harrowing 3-0 deficit glowering at the Hub Huskies. The most deflating aspect for the likes of Sulyma, next to authorizing three goals in such a narrow time frame after going through six straight games of two opposing goals or less, was the fact that the garbage collector seemed to have called in sick at the worst possible time.

As a consequence, UConn paced itself to an eventual 4-1 triumph at Matthews Arena, using 10 different point-getters along the way, to garner a passport to next weekend’s Hockey East semifinal. Now at 20-8-7 overall, and having ascended from No 8 to No. 7 in the PairWise rankings, Heather Linstad’s pupils might need nothing more than a semifinal victory to ensure a spot in the NCAA bracket.

Conversely, the brief-but-fatal freak downfall of their league-leading goaltender and the arid outcome of four power plays personified the ruins of a once-surprising, and later promising, Northeastern season. At 17-9-7 and demoted to No. 10 on the PairWise leaderboard by day’s end, NU’s 2009-10 campaign is virtually over.

Horan’s icebreaker fell just 26 ticks after senior Amy Hollstein’s jailbreak from the day’s first penalty kill. Beforehand, a fairly expectable air hockey-paced arm-wrestling match was at hand, and with Hollstein’s infraction, Northeastern had a chance to slow things down and get the upper hand early.

Nothing doing. The home team could not even scrape out an attempted shot on their power play and when the white Huskies failed to drink from their dish, the blue Huskies slipped in and capitalized.

In a span of roughly four minutes, Connecticut chalked up nine unanswered attempts, six of which landed on net. Three of those were stopped, but they each had a homeward bound rebound to go with them.

Horan, pointless in five of her previous six games to curtain the regular season, turned on the ignition with 5:57 gone. She offered Connecticut’s first registered test of Sulyma all day, then upon initial failure readily offered a second, succeeding on her second hack.

Right off the subsequent face-off, Sami Evelyn left a rebound for Murphy to slug home. And in another 75 seconds, Stathopolous –who like Horan was pointless in her previous four games before she assisted on her classmate’s goal- pelted Sulyma on one shot, then promptly penetrated her on the rebound for a gaping 3-0 edge.

Other than UConn’s opportunistic outburst, most of Saturday’s contest gave its viewers an expectably even zone-to-zone bout, the contesting teams often trading stabs at each other’s nets between whistles. But Northeastern’s early failure to zero in on their openings, especially on the power play, would accumulate dire consequences.

At 4:03 on the second period, amidst her team’s second penalty kill of the day, Hollstein spawned a 4-0 difference, repeating the feat of her teammates by polishing off her own rebound for her second shortie of the season.

While Jody Sydor continued to serve her two-minute sentence for holding, UConn eventually granted Northeastern a 39-second 5-on-3 segment with Rebecca Hewett cited for tripping at 4:31.

But NU could only thrust two shots –both off of Katy Applin’s stick- onto goaltender Alexandra Garcia’s property before Sydor came back. Then, after one more shot through the remaining 81 seconds of Hewett’s prison term, freshman Kelly Wallace at least managed to put her squad on the board just as Hewett was being released at 6:32.

That aside, and although NU pulled even in the shooting gallery, 16-16, after 40 minutes, Garcia held fort to keep the 4-1 difference intact for another Zamboni shift. One late bid by top gun Kristi Kehoe did elude Garcia, but the pipe had the goalie’s back on that one.

The tempo let up, if only by a touch, in the closing frame, Garcia and Schelling each dealing with five shots apiece. Northeastern went through nearly nine minutes from the initial face-off before they could even put a puck on net. And the power play brigade utterly whiffed on their fourth and final tour of duty, which ended at 14:07 with one wide and one blocked attempt to show for their effort.

From there, Garcia merely needed to handle three more sparsely distributed shots. The boa was already at work, seizing the life out of Northeastern and transferring a little more of it to UConn.