It was the home team that prevailed and won a pre-season best-of-three series between the Central Saskatchewan arch-rivals on Thursday night.

The Prince Albert Raiders out-lasted the Saskatoon Blades 5-4 in overtime to win two of the three exhibitions. The next time they meet, it’ll be the regular-season in two weeks time – a home-and-home series on Friday, September 25th back in P-A, followed by Saturday the 26th at SaskTel Centre. In what would be considered a lesson to be learned without standings consequences for the Bridge City Bunch, they’ll have to maintain their discipline and stay out of the penalty box. Maddix McCagherty scored at 2:32 of overtime on a power play for the Raiders. Prince Albert scored three times on seven chances on the man advantage while the Blue and Gold were oh-for-four in extra man situations. The Blades did score once while short-handed with another goal coming a second after a Saskatoon penalty had expired. McCagherty scored twice and assisted on both of Ben Harvey’s power play tallies. Brock Cripps and Alisher Sarkenov each chipped in a pair of helpers while Owen Corkish opened the scoring for the Raiders, who never trailed in the contest, although the Bridge City Bunch did battle back to knot the score twice. Konstantin Hutzinger, Yegor Gusev – in his first game in Blue and Gold – Hayden Harsanyi and Kazden Mathies replied for the Blades, who were out-shot 40-32 in the contest. Harsanyi and Mathies each had an assist for two-point nights. Both teams finish up their pre-season schedules the next two nights against Regina. P-A travels to the Queen City Friday night while Saskatoon welcomes the Pats to SaskTel Centre Saturday at 7 o’clock. CJWW has the broadcast of that game, beginning with pre-game chatter at 6:45. Following is Les Lazaruk’s post-game conversation with Blades’ head coach Dan Da Silva plus the official game summary courtesy the W-H-L website…..

SASKATOON Goals SASKATOON PLAYERS (plus) PRINCE ALBERT PLAYERS (minus) Per. Time  G-As1-As2 2nd 5:00  55-71-6 6 34 41 55 71 2 3 22 26 32 2nd 14:12  66-77 3 27 66 73 77 5 7 11 15 21 2nd 19:55 SH  6 6 34 73 77 12 17 20 22 32 3rd 11:30  77 27 34 41 67 77 2 7 24 26 27

PRINCE ALBERT Goals PRINCE ALBERT PLAYERS (plus) SASKATOON PLAYERS (minus) Per. Time  G-As1-As2 1st 9:35  32-5-26 5 12 22 26 32 25 28 34 41 67 1st 19:04 PP  20-17-24 2nd 9:02 PP  20-12-17 3rd 7:18  17-22 2 12 17 20 2 6 37 55 OT 2:32 PP  17-24-12