Taylor Heise likely will always refer to herself as a “pass-first gal.”
Wednesday night at Xcel Energy Center, with the puck on her stick and the game on the line, Heise didn’t have anyone to pass the puck to — and it led to a Frost victory.
Heise’s goal at 3:20 of overtime gave the Frost a 2-1 victory over the Boston Fleet.
Picking up the puck in the neutral zone, Heise carried the puck into the Boston zone down left wing. With no teammates around her, Heise cut to the center of the ice and fired a wrist shot past Fleet goaltender Emma Soderberg just inside the left post for her second goal of the season.
“That’s exactly what I said in the locker room,” Heise said about not having anyone to pass to. “Kelly (Pannek) gets on me every single day about it. I just feel like, sometimes you just shoot the puck. I had a really good warmup shot that looked just like that, and I was kind of going deja vu in my head.
“I ripped it, and that’s where it is. It’s a shot I practice a lot.”
Pannek is not the only one who is constantly exhorting Heise to shoot the puck more. It’s been a constant message from coach Ken Klee dating back to the start of last season.
“Keep shooting the puck — 100 percent,” Klee said. “It was everybody tonight. We looked for a lot of back-door plays that, obviously, Boston defended very well.
“We knew it was going to be tough to get one, it seemed like the game was so tight. So just getting pucks on net was obviously huge, and she made a heck of a shot at the end.”
Heise shared the spotlight with goaltender Maddie Rooney, who, like Heise, has been dealing with an illness the past week or so. Both players said they felt close to 100 percent on Wednesday.
“We kind of got pounded down the last week with injuries and sickness and things,” Heise said of the team as a whole. “I always feel when you come out of that you come out and feel really good, because you haven’t felt good in a while.
“So when we showed up today I knew a lot of the girls were pumped to play and just happy to be out there.”
The Frost, who came into the game off a 5-0 loss to the New York Sirens on Saturday,
continued to be without injured forwards Grace Zumwinkle and Dominique Petrie and injured defender Sophie Jaques. All are key components to the offense.
Their presence was certainly missed on the power play, where the Frost went 0 for 3 and was not able to generate much pressure on Soderberg.
“The first one I thought we moved it around well,” Klee said. “We hit her in the head once and they also had a really good block on us. The other two we just didn’t seem to find a groove where we were getting a lot of set-up time to run the progressions we wanted to run.”
Boston took a 1-0 lead at 3:40 of the first period when Hannah Bilka scored on a rebound. The Fleet appeared to take a 2-0 lead just over a minute later when Shay Maloney poked the puck past Rooney, but after video review the goal was wiped out due to goaltender interference.
The Frost tied the game at 11:40 when Denisa Krizova scored her first goal of the season on the rebound of a shot by Pannek.
“She’s been playing really well for us,” Klee said, of Krizova. “She plays 200-foot game that other people want to play with her because of hard she works. She creates stuff, so it’s nice to see her get rewarded as well.”
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