Montreal Canadiens junior Lane Hutson helped the United States to a 6-5 overtime win over Canada on Saturday in the two nations' final preseason game for the World Junior Championship.
With 2:39 left in overtime, the defenseman received the puck from Owen Beck, another Habs player, before beating Canadian goaltender Samuel St-Hilaire on the glove side. Watch the video above.
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Hutson also had a hand in his team's first goal of the first period. In fact, he brought Quinn Finley to the breakaway thanks to a great pass from the defensive zone of the American formation.
Goaltender Jacob Fowler, a third-round pick by the Canadian in the recent National Hockey League draft, played the first 29:05 minutes of the game for the United States, conceding two goals.
In addition to Hutson and Finley, Sam Rinzel, Ryan Leonard (twice) and Oliver Moore were the Americans' other goalscorers.
On the Canadian side, Macklin Celebrini pulled the strings twice. Owen Allard, Matthew Savoie and Conor Geekie also provided lyrics. Beck, meanwhile, picked up an assist on the Canadiens' fifth goal.
The third period went in favor of Canada, who scored two unanswered goals to take the game into overtime. Canadian head coach Alan Letang wants to build on the last 20 minutes of regular playing time at the start of the tournament.
“We take the first two periods of the game and learn from them, then we throw them away,” he said after the game in comments provided by Hockey Canada. We focus on the third period. We finally had a little emotion and a little physicality in our game; It started to attract more members of our group and that was what we needed. We’ve kind of been waiting for this group to break through like this and it’s nice to see.”
Canada will face Finland in its first game of the World Junior Championships on December 26th.