HALLOWELL — Not that the Winslow/Gardiner girls hockey team wants to make a habit of such things, but the Black Tigers suffered no ill effects from a constant march to the penalty box Thursday night.

Winslow/Gardiner scored a pair of shorthanded goals, including one while skating two players short in the first period, and rolled to a 7-2 win over Yarmouth/Freeport at the Camden National Bank Ice Vault. Evelyn Hinkley had a hat trick for the Black Tigers’ potent top line, while defenseman Bailey Robbins added a pair of goals of her own.

Senior Ashley Lachance capped the scoring in the third period with her first career goal.

In all, Winslow/Gardiner (8-6-1) was whistled for seven minor penalties in the game. Though head coach Alan Veilleux wasn’t necessarily thrilled with that aspect of the game, he was happy with the way his charges handled the adversity.

The Black Tigers were a perfect 7 for 7 on the penalty kill, holding the Clippers to just five total power play shots.

“We did do that,” Veilleux said. “We took a lot of stupid penalties through the first two periods. I told them that we were done with the stupid penalties, and if we continued to do it, we’d have to take action on it. We figured it out.”

“Most of our girls, myself included, that’s just how we play. We’re just naturally aggressive,” Hinkley said of the Tigers’ propensity for taking penalties. “Our penalty kill has had to catch up to us, because that’s how we play. We’ve had to work on our penalty kill, because sometimes it feels like there’s just no stopping it.”

Nowhere was that more apparent than in the first two periods. On two different occasions the Yarmouth/Freeport (1-11-1) was handed lengthy two-man advantages — once for 1:25 in the opening frame and then for an additional 1:20 in the middle period — but neither time were the Clippers able to generate the jumpstart they needed.

Over the course of the 2:45, Winslow/Gadiner outscored Yarmouth/Freeport 1-0 and outshot the visitors by a 3-0 count.

“Half of it is that we’ve been running the same thing all season, so we’ve had a lot of time to evolve and really perfect it,” Hinkley said. “The other half is just that we play hard and right to the puck. That gets the job done.”

“We don’t really want penalties, but sometimes they happen,” Robbins said. “We try and do a certain (penalty-killing) play that we practice all the time. Almost everyone on the team knows how to do it.”

The shorthanded breakaway goal by Anna Chadwick just 4:30 into the game was the first of two shorthanded goals by the Black Tigers in the first period as they built a 3-1 lead through 15 minutes. Hinkley similarly scored on a shorthanded breakaway with 1:07 left in the period after Julia Hinkley made a nice play to break up a point-to-point pass at the Black Tiger blue line and send her sister in on Yarmouth/Freeport netminder Allie Perrotta (19 saves).

The game was likely decided during a furious stretch late in the first, when the teams combined for three goals in a 52-second span. Robbins netter her first while Hinkley picked up her second just 29 seconds apart, but Yarmouth/Freeport cut the lead to 3-1 with Lydia Guay’s strike at 12:07.

Hinkley completed her hat trick at 3:00 of the second period, and Robbins added a second goal at 10:29 to build a 6-1 lead for the Black Tigers.

It marked the first time Robbins has scored twice in a game this season.

“We were very pumped as a team, very hype in the locker room. The way the warmup went, I knew we’d be successful,” Robbins said. “We try and expect that we’re always going to win, and we try to go into every game (playing) hard.”

Travis Barrett — 621-5621

tbarrett@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @TBarrettGWC

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