The Brookline (Mass.) High boys hockey team is not a particularly great one. The team boasts a record of 4-8, and even those four wins probably came in large part due to the efforts of the team’s standout goalie, junior Jake Paul.
When facing Wellesley, a team with much, much more firepower than Brookline, Paul finally outdid himself. As reported by the Boston Globe and a handful of other Massachusetts outlets, Paul stonewalled an astounding 71 Wellesley shots en route to a 2-0 shutout victory for Brookline.
“I’m really tired,” Paul told the Globe. “And I can’t quite believe this has happened. I’m glad I could give my team a win. You just go period by period. You don’t go into the first period with or without any expectations, you just play 15 minutes of hockey at a time.”
If that total of 71 saves sounds almost preposterous, that’s because it is. The 71 saves tied the existing national mark for the second most saves in a single game, behind only the all-time goalie standout performance turned in by Flint (Mich.) Northern High standout Jamey Ramsey, who finished one victory with 84 saves in 1987.
Do the math, and one learns that Paul averaged more than 1.5 saves per minute of the game. That kind of constant pressure should be enough to crack any netminder, but it somehow failed to fell Paul, who just kept swatting strong Wellesley attempts to the side.
Eventually the goalie’s teammates came through with a pair of goals of their own, propelling Brookline and Paul to one of the more memorable victories and individual performances in recent Massachusetts memory.
“I don’t know what to say,” Brookline coach Steve Trundle, a 20-year coaching veteran at the school, told the Globe. “It was obviously outstanding and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Neither has Prep Rally, and we may not see an effort like that again for some time.
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