“Our rallying cry was ‘Five is greater than one,’ and when we played as a five-man unit we won every game. The one game that we lost we got away from that and tried to get a little too individual, but when we played as a team we were fantastic. I couldn’t be prouder of the boys.”

With an 11-1-0 record and the top ranked offense and defense, the Sabercats had established themselves as the top team in the Peewee Division and they played like it throughout the first period on Sunday. Following some early flashes from the Cobras, the Sabercats controlled the game, but thanks to some brilliant play by Central Mass goaltender Jacob Sanville they could not pull away on the scoreboard. The only goal of the opening 15:00 came early, forward Jake Fleet picking a rebound out of the air with a baseball-like swing and batting it into the net for a 1-0 South Shore lead at 3:57.

Things continued to break in the Sabercats favor as they netted a pair early in the second. Ben Jenkinson made it 2-0 at 1:44 when he found himself in the right place at the right time to get a clean whack at a loose rebound and an open net. It was a goal that came less than a minute before Nate Garrett made it 3-0 at 2:31.

The Cobras got their first break of the game at the 4:45 mark of the second when Carson Whitman got his side on the board as he chipped the puck past the Sabercats’ defense at his own defensive blue line to spring himself on a shorthanded breakaway that he buried to cut the Central Mass deficit to 3-1.

About a minute later, a shoving match broke out between Sanville and South Shore’s David Romaine, and a scrum ensued. The game began to turn in the aftermath of that skirmish in front of the Central Mass net. At first, things seemed as though they would begin to break in favor of the Cobras as they started to take over the play with the Sabercats seemingly rattled. South Shore was able to regain their composure, however, and get back to their championship mission.

“I think the turning point of the game was we came out of those penalties where it was 5-on-3 or 4 vs. 4 or whatever and we got back to playing our game,” Lockwood said. “Winning the blue lines, getting the puck out of our zone, getting the puck deep, making the Cobras skate 200-feet to score rather than turning it over in the neutral zone.

“Once we started doing that, then the momentum came back to our side and we were able to close out the game.”

They restored their three-goal lead at 8:20 of the second, once again capitalizing on a loose puck in front of the net. Whitman got his second of the period, however, before it came to a close, sending the Cobras to the final 15:00 of regulation with a manageable two-goal deficit.

The tension mounted as time wore thin in regulation, but with the Sabercats no longer phased they began to put the game away near mid-period. A great outlet pass found its way to a hanging Fleet who went in alone on a breakaway to garner a 5-2 lead at 7:28. Nick Solari then came up with one of the biggest goals of the season for the Sabercats at 11:06 to make it 6-2, all but sealing the Peewee Gold Cup Championship, the second NEFS title for a group that highlighted the 2012 Squirt Gold Cup Championship Sabercats team.

“It’s a special group of kids and that’s the difference,” Lockwood said. “I’ve never been involved with a team where kids have come together, listened to both [co-coach] Craig [Ingemi] and I, and gone out there and tried to do some things as a team that we were asking them to do and they did it without question.

“They accepted that coaching and they went out there and did it, and they really need to be commended for that. For kids 11-, 12-years old to do that is really admirable.”