AMHERST – Michael Gabel must learn to stop doing things like this. It’s just not necessary to make the No. 12 Massachusetts men’s lacrosse team feel like it can’t score.
“He was playing like a wall in there,” UMass senior attackman Dan Paccione said. “Coach said he had 16 saves in the first half. That’s a great game for a goalie if he gets that for the entire game.
“But he wasn’t going to make another 16.”
Led by Paccione’s second-straight four-goal performance, the Minutemen exploded for nine goals in the final stanza to beat the Catamounts 10-3 yesterday at Richard F. Garber Field.
“We went into halftime and no one got upset each other,” said Paccione, whose Minutemen (3-1) peppered Gabel (21 saves) with 30 first half shots only to lead 1-0 midway. “No one got mad, everyone stayed composed. Everybody knew what we had to do, and that was to finish the ball.”
And finish, they did. After a Vermont (1-2) goal three minutes in to the second half to tie the game at 1-1, the Minutemen went off.
With 10:12 to go in the third period, senior Marc Morely laced a low shot to the left corner to give UMass a 2-1 lead. Thirty seconds later, Paccione raced down the left sideline, cut in front of the net and touched twine to put the Minutemen up 3-1.
“Once you break that ice, once your score that one goal, then it’s like boom, boom, boom,” Paccione said. “We just kept getting more goals.”
Morely’s quickstick with 8:41 remaining and Paccione’s nearside laser a couple minutes later gave UMass a 5-1 advantage. Sophomore Jeff Zywicki found classmate Kevin Glenz behind the defense with 5:15 remaining for the easy score and Morely found a leaping Paccione a minute later for a quickstick tally to give the Minutemen a 7-1 lead with one quarter to play.
“They stayed pretty disciplined throughout the game,” said coach Greg Cannella, whose team scored seven second period goals in a 13-10 win at Navy Saturday. “I think Vermont started to get a little tired and we scored all those goals in transition. That’s where we’re at our best. We played good defense, got ground balls and then started the breaks.”
The UMass offense didn’t falter in the first half. It dominated the Catamount defense and managed several open looks in the process. Gabel just played on his head.
“We were making the plays, we were making the shots, but it just wasn’t going in,” Paccione said. “It’s very frustrating going into the half only up 1-0 knowing we had a lot of shots. We were trying everything.”
With 7:22 left in the second stanza, freshman Gene Tundo faked twice and took a shot from point blank range that Gabel somehow got his stick in front of. And with seven seconds left in the half, Gabel got a leg on junior Kevin Leveille’s shot from under two feet out.
“It would have been unusual if he had as good a second half as he did in the first half,” Cannella said.
The last time UMass was held to just one goal was in 1964 in an 8-1 loss to Brown. Coincidentally, the Minutemen host the Bears Saturday at 1 p.m., looking for their fourth straight victory.
