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Playoff hockey games can turn into an absolute marathon if neither team is able to get the goal they need to win. However, two U-12 clubs in Minnesota may have set a record that will be hard to beat in a showdown that took three days to play before it finally ended midway through the twelfth overtime period.
Hockey teams are known for turning things up an extra notch when the postseason rolls around, and the playoffs have a reputation for spawning some incredibly hard-fought battles between two squads that leave it all on the ice in their quest for a victory.
Those contests can’t end in a tie, and there have been more than a few occasions where NHL teams have essentially played multiple games to decide a single one.
There have been two cases where a Stanley Cup Playoff game was decided in the sixth overtime period, with the Red Wings and the Montreal Maroons setting a record that’s yet to be topped in the league during a tilt that spanned 116 minutes and 30 seconds before Detroit got a 1-0 win on March 24, 1936.
From what I can tell, the Storhamar Dragons and the Sparta Warriors of Norway’s EliteHockey Ligaen were responsible for the longest overtime game in the history of pro hockey; an octuple overtime grind that lasted for 217 minutes and 14 second of game time and wrapped up around eight-and-a-half hours after it started in 2017.
However, they’ve been firmly outdone by a couple of youth teams in Minnesota.
Two U-12 hockey teams in Minnesota needed a shootout to decide a game that featured 12 overtime periods
On Monday, the Cottage Grove Wolfpack and St. Paul Saints, two U-12 girls’ teams located in the Twin Cities metro area, took to the ice at Doug Woog Arena for a District 8 playoff showdown.
According to KTSP, they were knotted at one goal apiece at the end of regulation, and they subsequently headed to overtime before running into an issue after neither one of them was able to break the tie following six extra periods.
The two sides agreed to suspend the game and resume the action the following night, but the score remained 1-1 after four more fruitless OTs pushed the total to ten. The squads agreed to reconvene on Wednesday night and hashed out a plan with league officials to do ten minutes of 5-on-5 and ten more at 3-on-3 before heading to a shootout if it was still deadlocked.
That ended up being the case, and the shootout needed six rounds to be decided before Ashlyn Anderson netted a wrister for the Wolfpack to finally put things away. As you can probably imagine, the goalies were very busy, as Cottage Grove’s Lydia Pettey finished the game with 96 saves as St. Paul’s Ellen Weiberg stopped 55 shots of her own.
The Wolfpack won’t have much time to recover, as they’ll be facing off against the Farmington Tigers on Thursday night.