The University of Maine’s hockey team’s frustrations continued on Saturday afternoon.
The Black Bears’ Lynden Breen tied the game against the nation’s eighth-ranked University of Connecticut Huskies with 5:10 remaining but Justin Pearson answered just 46 seconds later to give UConn a second consecutive 3-2 win over the Black Bears at the XL Center in Hartford, Connecticut.
UConn won Friday’s game in overtime.
UConn is now 9-1-1 overall and 6-1-0 in Hockey East, while UMaine fell to 2-6-1, 0-3-1, and had its winless streak extended to five games (0-4-1).
Pearson scored his first goal of the season by taking an Andrew Lucas pass, walking out front from the low slot and beating UMaine goalie Victor Ostman from between the faceoff dots.
UMaine took a 1-0 lead in the first period on a goal by freshman Felix Trudeau, the first of his career.
Justin Michaelian passed the puck to Grant Herbert, who found an open Trudeau with a pass and Trudeau fired the puck past Arsenii Sergeev.
The Black Bears had a chance to extend the lead with a five-minute power play but failed to do so and, just after UConn killed it off, Matthew Wood beat Ostman with a shot through traffic at the 4:36 mark of the second period.
It was his fourth of the season.
Chase Bradley supplied UConn with its first lead of the game when he fired a shot from a near-impossible angle along the extended goal line and it glanced off Ostman’s helmet and back.
It was his fifth of the season.
Breen tied it with his team-high third goal when a Ben Poisson pass deflected off Reid Pabich to him and he snapped the puck past Sergeev.
UMaine had a 31-26 edge in shots on goal.
Sergeev finished with 29 saves to Ostman’s 23.
“We played as well as we can,” said UMaine second-year head coach Ben Barr. “But there are no moral victories. We are doing enough to win games but we aren’t winning them. We have to find ways to win instead of ways to lose.”
“We could have won both games this weekend but we came out with no points,” he added.
UMaine will visit Merrimack for a 4 p.m. Friday game and a 7 p.m. contest on Saturday.
UConn plays a home-and-home with Providence next weekend.
