The Minor Bantam AE team got the full Marlies Experience yesterday. They spent their day at the Ricoh Coliseum where they, first, played an exhibition game against the Pickering Panthers AE team and then watched the hometown Toronto Marlies take on the Hartford Wolf Pack.
The exhibition game proved to be a close contest between two evenly matched teams. The Pickering Panthers scored first and jumped out to a quick 2-0 lead. The Tigers answered back with two goals of their own to tie the game but, with 25 seconds left in the first period, the Panthers scored again to regain the lead.
In the second period, the Panthers scored and went up 4-2. The Tigers responded with a goal to cut into the lead but, once again, a late goal, with just five seconds remaining in the period, restored the two-goal Panthers lead.
Due to a pending time curfew, the referees advised that the third period would be shortened to ten minutes and that we would be playing with a running clock. The Minor Bantam AE Aurora Tigers had to dig deep... and that they did! With 5:20 left in the game the flood gates opened and, within 2 minutes and 9 seconds, the Tigers scored three unanswered goals to take a 6-5 lead!
The boys held on to win the game and it definitely made the smiles in the team photo, taken right after the final buzzer, just that much bigger!
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After a quick bite in Liberty Village, the team returned to the Ricoh Coliseum to watch the Toronto Marlies make a comeback of their own (though a much smaller comeback in comparison to the one the Tigers had just accomplished) and beat the Hartford Wolf Pack by a score of 5-3.