CORNWALL, Ont. - There's always water close by, whenever Camrose and Humboldt meet with a national crown on the line.
It'll be a prairie battle on the shores of the St. Lawrence River Sunday in Cornwall, when the top-seed Camrose Kodiaks square off with the Humboldt Broncos (No.2) in the RBC junior A national title game.
The Broncos dominated the host Colts 6-1 Saturday to earn their first trip to the finals since 2003 when they beat Camrose 3-1 in the title tilt at Charlottetown.
"A coach can't ask for much more from his team," Humboldt's Dean Brockman said after his team improved to 5-0 when facing elimination this playoff year.
"That was our best game of the tourney. We were responsible all over the ice, and we buried our chances."
The Colts squandered a lot of their opportunities, going 0-for-8 on the powerplay.
"We just ran out of steam tonight, and our (lack of) execution on the powerplay didn't help," said Cornwall head coach Ian MacInnis, whose club was a surprising 2-2 in the round-robin.
"Overall I thought we did a helluva job this week. We weren't expected to win hockey games."
Said Colts captain Darcy Findlay, of Shawville, Que.: "We had the community behind us. It was nice, a lot of fun. But (losing is) kind of hard to swallow right now."
Cornwall got a shorthanded goal from Alain Joanette to tie the game 1-1 at 11:55 of the opening period. But Joanette was assessed a roughing penalty on the play when he crashed into goalie Taylor Nelson, and the Broncos had a two-man advantage for 61 seconds. The Colts killed off the first penalty but not Joanette's - Humboldt went back in front on Tory Allen's power-play goal at 13:15.
The Colts had a rare spurt of offensive pressure in the second period just before Humboldt went up 3-1 when Laurent Benjamin scored on Jordan Schindel's feed across the slot to conclude a two-on-one break at 10:45.
Tanner Vandesype extended the lead to 4-1 with a powerplay marker 58 seconds into the third period, and Edward Gale scored his second of the night midway in the period. Matthew Rintoul closed out the scoring at 16:12.