The big hit that Arseneault took also caused collateral damage to the Blue Devils (4-2-1), who were without freshman Bree Bergeron for the remainder of the game after being called for a boarding minor late in the second period.

“It happens,” Blue Devils head coach Ron Dumont said of losing Bergeron. “They make the call, I got to live with it.”

It was Bergeron who put the Blue Devils up 2-0 just 26 seconds into the second period, scoring a power play goal on a shot between the circles.

The Blue Devils took a 1-0 lead five minutes into a dominant first period, as Chloe Morin scored from Katie Lemieux.

Arseneault had the best chance for the Red Hornets (3-2-2) during an otherwise listless first period for the hosts, but her drive to the net was stopped by Blue Devils goalie Meagan Gosselin, who then fell on the loose puck in the crease.

“She’s been our spark plug all season, and she’s so loved in the locker room,” Red Hornets head coach Shon Collins said of Arseneault. “A lot of the girls were kind of shaken up and very worried about her.”

“We all talked, and we know Saige,” Red Hornets junior Ally MacKenzie said. “And she wouldn’t want us to go out like that without her. She would want us to go out and kick butt.”

It was MacKenzie that put her team on her shoulders, according to Collins, as she ended the shutout just over five minutes into the second period, scoring on a shot from the point that had eyes to find its way into the back of the net.

“We were down and we didn’t really want to be down,” MacKenzie said. “It’s Lewiston, you know. It’s our rival. I think it really made us wake up and realize we can’t lose. I saw the low shot there, so I went low.”

MacKenzie tied the game up 3:25 into the third, as she rushed through the Blue Devils defense before beating Gosselin at the left post.

The Blue Devils were presented with a prime opportunity to retake the lead in the third, as they were on he power play for nearly seven consecutive minutes, but they could muster only two shots.

“(It was) Difficult, but you go back to you should be able to adjust, which we tried to do,” Dumont said of not scoring on the extended man-advantage. “But without Bree, who plays the top of the power play, everybody’s in a different role.”

The Red Hornets combined the motivation of playing for Arseneault with the momentum gained from killing off the long penalty time to control the game for the rest of regulation and the eight-minute overtime period. They out-shot their rivals 13-2 after the second period, but Gosselin made enough key saves to hold the game to a draw.

“You look for the positives out of games,” Collins said. “We’ve lost the last two by pretty big margins. So we needed to bounce back a little bit. And I think the intestinal fortitude we showed to come back from two goals down to tie the game, that’s the positive we’re focusing on as coaches. Obviously we would have loved to have finished a couple more chances that we had.”

wkramlich@sunjournal.com