Box Score NEW HAVEN, Conn. – The Yale Women's Hockey Team is in the hunt for home ice in the playoffs and tonight's 5-3 win over Colgate could go a long way in reaching that goal.
Elle Hartje scored twice and had three points,
Claire Dalton had a goal and three assists and
Gianna Meloni made 30 saves as the Elis erased a 2-1 deficit with four straight goals.
The Bulldogs (15-11-0, 12-7-0), who are one win shy of the program record, are in fifth place, two points behind Clarkson and a pair in front of sixth-place Quinnipiac with three games left in the regular season. The top four teams in the ECAC get home ice for the first round.
The Bulldogs were outshot 10-7 in the first period but notched the only goal with 20.9 seconds left. Dalton had the puck in the right circle and fired a pass toward
Charlotte Welch in the slot. The feed got past Welch and continued through to the other side of the net. Yale blueliner
Emma Seitz, who had two points, gathered it in the lower circle and fired an off angle shot into the top corner of the net for her sixth of the year.
"Scoring first was big for us after not getting a goal at Clarkson [last Saturday]," said
Mark Bolding, Yale's Susan Cavanagh Head Coach. "We showed good resiliency when we were down, won a lot of battles and figured out a way to weather the storm."
Colgate scored the next two goals in the first half of the middle frame before Yale evened the score at 16:51.
Kirsten Nergaard set up
Greta Skarzynski with a perfect drop pass in the slot and the junior buried it for her third of the season and the 50
th point of her career.
Another great Yale pass created the game-winning tally with 13:16 left in the third. Welch, who also had two points, skated into the left circle in traffic and found Hartje open in the right circle. She feathered a pass to Hartje, who snapped off a wrister from the slot that went top shelf.
Colgate outshot the home team 33-27, but the Elis had junior Yale netminder
Gianna Meloni to make big save after big save. She made 10 stops in the first and a dozen in the third, mixing in a few highlight stops on grade-A chances.
The Raiders pulled their goalie with 2:32 left, which enabled Hartje and Dalton to hit empty nets and put the game away.
"We had a really good third period. We continue to work hard and do the little things, really dialing into the details," said Bolding, whose Elis host No. 1 Cornell tomorrow on Senior Day at the Whale.
