After a very impressive opening series against LIU, Penn State men’s hockey hit its first roadblock of the season last Friday by suffering a 4-1 loss to Canisius.

Following the disappointing showing, head coach Guy Gadowsky did not mince words when talking about his team’s performance.

“Honestly, [I] felt like we wanted a cute game,” Gadowsky said. “We’ve gone through that attitude in the past, and had to change it, and hopefully, this is a really good lesson because we’re not a cute team, but we played like we wanted to be tonight.”

Shots were once again in favor of the Nittany Lions, but a lack of second and third chances made things easy for Golden Griffins goaltender Jacob Barczewski, who went on to stop 39 of the 40 Penn State shots en route to his first victory of the season.

“It didn’t feel like a lot of good chances, so I don’t think we did it,” Gadowsky said. “We certainly didn’t get to the net like we need to, and that’s part of what I talked about the attitude of being a cute team. Cute teams tend to be perimeter, and in the past, I think we’ve done a lot of second and third chances that we didn’t really see.”

There were very few positives to take away from game one of the series. Neither Gadowsky nor senior captain Paul DeNaples were pleased with the effort that the team put forth.

“Honestly, I think the whole game we just didn’t come ready to play tonight,” DeNaples said. “They outworked us, they played well, and you’re not discrediting them. We just didn’t give ourselves a chance to win at all today. I think that we could play differently and be fancy and get away with it, and that didn’t happen tonight. Obviously, it showed.”

Both Gadowsky and DeNaples hinted at the team being too cute and too fancy and needing to be tougher moving forward.

“It was a really big wake-up call for us that we’re really not going to be a team that’s gonna be toe dragging and making highlight-reel goals,” DeNaples continued. “So, we gotta get nitty-gritty Penn State hockey as we’ve always been.”

With no time to hang their heads, the Nittany Lions found themselves right back on the ice no less than 18 hours following its lackluster performance. Penn State, fueled by the anger of its previous defeat, was able to get more second and third chances on goal, which led to an offensive outburst that helped the team split the two-game series.

The Nittany Lions get a nice break but will continue their season on Thursday, October 21, at home against Niagara. Puck drop from Pegula is set for 7 p.m.