Friday night: back at the Arena for the start of another busy weekend, the Trois-Rivieres Lions were the opposition. The Royals entered the weekend needing one more standings point to clinch a postseason berth, that was accomplished on this night in the form of a 6-2 victory. Colin Felix scored the first and sixth goals, the middle of the sandwich featured two scores by Max Newton and single tallies from Alec Butcher and Jacob Gaucher. Pat Nagle was the winning goaltender as the club qualifies for the playoffs for the fifteenth time in twenty-one seasons of competition (the '01-'02 season was the franchise's debut, we didn't make it that year or in '03, '07, '09 or '19 and we won't even discuss what happened over the next two years). It was a intense game that got downright nasty in the third period, fifty-two total penalty minutes were issued with thirty-eight of them coming in the final frame. The Saturday game was a 4:00 start with the visitors from Quebec evening the series with a 3-1 win, Shane Sellar was the Royals' lone goal-scorer. The rubber match on Sunday required the overtime shootout (for the first time at the Arena since March of '22), Trois-Rivieres outscored the Royals two-to-one and won the game 3-2. Mason Millman and newcomer Solag Bakich (from the University of Notre Dame) scored in regulation, for the second straight game newly-added Matt Vernon was the goaltender of record. Vernon is from Colorado College, his father Mike played over seven-hundred games in the NHL and was a two-time Stanley Cup champion. The Royals stand at 38-23-6 overall and 20-11-2 at home, the next Arena date is on April 12th. The game on Sunday started at 3:00 and ended at 5:30 but the weekend wasn't over, at 6:00 the annual Battle Of The Badges game faced off. This game began in 2006 and had always been played PRIOR to a Royals game. Over the years the format has been tweaked, this time around was a first-time meeting as the Reading/Berks County first-responders hosted their brethren from Harrisburg/Capital Region. Harrisburg won the game, it was over around 7:30 (three fifteen-minute periods, the third period was running-time). Take care, thanks for reading.
