By CLAUDE SCILLEY

Sometimes, the score of a hockey game says all you need to know about what happened in it.

Sometimes, there’s more to it than that.

Put Saturday’s annual challenge match between the Royal Military College Paladins and U.S. Military Academy Black Knights in the latter file.

“We didn’t deserve to win the game,” RMC coach Adam Shell said Sunday. “We did not deserve to lose 8-0.”

Amid a flurry of penalties that led the Paladins to play virtually half of the first two periods shorthanded—21 minutes in penalties in that time to RMC, just two to the home team—Army scored five power-play goals.

Two were pivotal.

The first came not long after RMC had killed a 5-on-3 Army power play, during which Paladins goaltender Evan Deviller took another penalty. “There’s a guy standing in his crease and he jabbed him,” Shell said. “ He deserved a penalty, probably, but so does the guy standing in his crease.”

Since that penalty couldn’t start until the others were over, Army stayed on the power play and Ryan Nick scored on a screened shot to give his team a 2-0 lead.

“We killed off the 5-on-3,” Shell said. “We did a great job … and you know how the game works: you kill off the 5-on-3, you sort of take a deep breath and now you can go again. We had to kill off another (penalty) and they scored.

“It was the beginning of the end, probably.”

If it wasn’t, probably Army’s next power-play goal was, coming on a deflection by Joe Kozlak with less than a minute to play in the period.

“Their power play was good; our penalty kill was not as good,” Shell said. “Coming from the penalty-kill coach himself, it was not very good in some ways but, then again, when you’re killing most of the first two periods, for penalties that seem to be, let’s say, not of the standard that we’re used to, it’s frustrating.”

After scoring four minutes into the second period for a 5-0 lead, Army scored twice on a five-minute RMC penalty to turn the game into a rout.

For those familiar with the series, it’s a familiar refrain; many an RMC hockey coach has come home from West Point muttering about the officiating.

“Up until this point, I haven’t,” Shell said. “I always knew what we were getting into. I know we’re going to get a bit of the short end of the stick at any given time; it’s just the way it is whenever we go down and play U.S. teams. When we played Vermont it was the same way, but not like that. Not like that. It was bad.

“I hate sounding like the sour-grapes coach. I generally don’t say things like this. Usually when the refereeing is bad in our league it’s bad for both teams.”

Such a display was, however, out of character for his team.

“We’re 0-and-whatever (in the league play) and we deserve to be, but if you look, we’re the second-least penalized team in the league,” Shell said. “We were a little emotional. Fine. We deserved some penalties, maybe more than our average, but so did they. If you’d told me the penalty minutes were 23-17, I would have said fine, but not 23-4.”

Coaching in such circumstances is not easy. At the same time as he wants to show some emotion and support for his players, a coach knows doing so risks setting a bad example for them.

“The double-edge sword of it is I do want to get in the referee’s face a little bit and push him a little bit and show that it’s not fair,” Shell said, “but the more I get angry, the more it justifies our guys getting angry. You have to bite your tongue a little bit because you’ve got to keep them within reason.

“That’s the thing. As guys get more frustrated, they want to play harder, they want to be more physical, and that just gets us more into trouble. It’s a bit of a vicious circle that way.”

In spite of the score, RMC got a strong game from Deviller, who made 52 saves—“Evan’s always good,” Shell said. “He’s terrific”— and all in all, the team wasn’t as bad as 8-0 suggests.

“After the first period we were down 4-0, and … I didn’t think we played that badly,” Shell said. “They’re better than us—they’re bigger than us, they’re stronger than us, we were missing our No. 1 centre, we don’t have a ton of depth, blah, blah, blah. They still would have won the game. (Penalties) did not lose us the game, but it was not a fair process for the guys. It was probably a 3-0, 3-1, 4-0—in that ballpark.

“It deserved to be a better game.”

Clint Carlisle had a goal and three assists to lead Army to its fourth straight win over RMC, which hasn’t won a game in the series since 2002. C.J. Reuschlein, with two, Nick, Kozlak, Maurice Alvarez, Zak Zaremba and Joe Llaurado scored the other goals for the Knights, while Cole Burns made 19 saves for the shutout.

“Anytime you have a rivalry game you know there's going to be a different level of intensity, ” Knights coach Brian Riley told goarmysports.com. “We came out strong. I didn't know what kind of game it was going to be like, but those early power-play goals helped our momentum. Both military academies teach discipline and it was just good hockey without getting out of hand. I thought we did a really good job, especially with the power-play goals. ”