By CLAUDE SCILLEY

For long stretches of their hockey game Friday night, the Queen’s Golden Gaels played like they didn’t really want to be there.

For some of them, that problem will be solved Saturday.

“You’re going to see a different lineup tomorrow,” Gaels coach Brett Gibson vowed, scowling, after his team dropped a 3-2 Ontario University Athletics hockey decision to the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks at the Memorial Centre.

“When you’ve lost six in a row it’s time to send a message, and the only way to send a message (to players) is through ice time and lineup, so I’m going to make some significant pulls from our lineup.”

The Gaels, 8-5-1 in late November after winning four of five, are now tied at 8-11-1 with Ontario Tech for sixth place, just three points ahead of eighth-place Concordia. Queen’s is fortunate that eight of nine teams in the East division make the playoffs, and the ninth team happens to be RMC, which is winless this year.

Gibson was asked if it was fair to describe his team’s performance against Laurier as flat.

“Very, very, very fair,” he said. “Flat might be flattering.”

Laurier, the last-place team in the West division, came to town nine games under .500, having lost six in a row and eight of its previous nine games. Perhaps the only team in the league with a younger roster than the Gaels—12 first-year players, just two fourth-years and no fifth-year seniors—Laurier was about as good an opponent a team hoping to break a five-game losing streak could want.

Queen’s scored the only goal of the first period, but fell behind 2-1 in the second when the Hawks scored goals a little less than four minutes apart. Luke Heitkamp’s goal in the sixth minute of the third period made it 3-1.

None of the Laurier goals was a classic. The first took a strange bounce over Gaels goaltender Kevin Bailie; the second came when Tim Stothers was left alone in front of the Queen’s goal and slid a rebound into the open side as two Gaels stood within a stride of him. It was the 11th goal of the year for Stothers, nephew of former Kingston Canadians defenceman Mike Stothers.

The eventual game-winner came when the Gaels' defence backed in on top of Bailie and then were caught looking at their feet for a loose puck that Heitkamp was instead smacking into the open side of the net.

Taylor Clements scored for Queen’s with about five minutes left in the third period, getting up after he was knocked down behind the net to tuck a rebound into the vacated side of the Laurier goal.

Though the Gaels pulled Bailie for a sixth skater in the final 65 seconds, they could not score.

That doomed Queen’s to its 11th one-goal loss of the season (if games where an empty-net goal creates a two-goal defeat are counted), and it was the eighth time this year an opponent scored the game-winning goal in the third period or overtime.

No wonder Gibson is perplexed.

“I’m grasping for straws right now,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve had way worse teams than this, and I don’t think I’ve been on a six-game losing streak in a long time.

“The reality is, as coaches, we exhaust ourselves with video; we put a game plan in place, and the very first five minutes of the game we didn’t follow the plan one bit.

“I don’t know what to say.”

Things don’t get any easier Saturday night, when the Gaels host the red-hot Waterloo Warriors.

“They’re on a nine-game winning streak and probably playing the best hockey in the OUA,” Gibson said. “They’re big; they’re real big, and they’re going to come in and run us out of the rink if we don’t wake up. That’s the way they play. They play a lot like Carleton. The good news is we answered the bell against Carleton, 1-0 and 2-1, both games lost, but at least we competed.

“Maybe we need a team that we’ve got to be scared of, because we’re not scared of some teams, and we play like it.”

Justin Rasmussen scored Laurier’s first goal. A power-play goal by Patrick McGillis opened the scoring for Queen’s in the first period.

Rookie goalie Colin Furlong, who played 20 games for the Kingston Frontenacs two years ago, gained his first win in just his second intercollegiate game, making 41 saves for Laurier, many of them shots the unimaginative Gaels buried in his chest protector. Bailie faced 40 shots in the Queen’s goal, and had by far the more difficult saves to make, including one on a breakaway by Kyle Morrison in the closing 30 seconds of the second period.

• Thursday night in Sudbury, the Royal Military College Paladins, struggling to gain their first win of the season, lost 5-4 in overtime to the Laurentian Voyageurs. Playing on a rare one-game road trip into northern Ontario, RMC tied the game on a goal by Eric Louis-Seize with four minutes left in the third period. Nick Esposto’s second goal of the game, halfway through the five-minute overtime, gave the Voyageurs, 11-6-3, the victory.

RMC looked poised to start overtime with a power play, when they caught Laurentian’s Michael MacDonald using illegal equipment in the closing seconds of the third period. That would-be advantage was nullified, however, when RMC’s Kyle Phillips was called for roughing as time expired in regulation time.

Jake Bullen, with two, and Frederic Thouin scored the other goals for RMC, which was outshot 47-25, including 2-1 in overtime.

The Paladins resume play Saturday night, when they host the McGill Redmen at 7 p.m. at Constantine Arena.