HANCOCK — It would be easy to label the Finlandia Lions men’s hockey team’s 6-1 loss to the Marian Sabres Friday night at the Houghton County Arena a disastrous start.

While the stats say one thing, six goals on 38 shots for the Sabres to one goal and 24 shots for the Lions, for Finlandia, just getting the chance to take the ice and play a game for the first time in nearly 357 days was a win in itself.

Head coach Joe Burcar admitted after the contest that he could have dressed down his squad for the mistakes and miscues that led to the lopsided score, but he chose rather to focus on the fact that his team had the chance to play, something that will be far more valuable to his young squad that features just three seniors, two of which are goaltenders.

“It’s a blessing,” Burcar said. “I mean, you could use a lot of different phrases right now, but it’s just we’re fortunate to play.

“It’s a good group of guys. I’m not gonna be frustrated with them because we did a lot of good things against a quality opponent. We (have to) do better if we want to win.”

The Lions had stretches of the game where they were dominant, pinning the Sabres in their own end. Unfortunately, they could not sustain that pressure for longer than five minutes at a time.

“We did a lot of good things well,” said Burcar. “So the score doesn’t indicate really where it’s at…so we’ll build off of this. We did a lot of good things. We’ll clean up the areas (we have to).

“It’s not hard to figure out what to clean up. That’s the good thing, it’s fixable. We got to play. It’s not the result we wanted, but we’re gonna move forward.”

There are reasons to trust that Burcar made the right decision with his young group. Two young players had several very good nights, despite the team’s overall struggles. Assistant captain Tyler Vanuden found himself seeing action on the power play, on the penalty kill, in key moments throughout the night, and he rewarded his coach’s faith with his first goal of the season at 13:25 of the second period when he took a pass from freshman defenseman Chris Beyer and beat Sabres goaltender Colby Muise.

Another Lions skater who had a strong night was freshman defenseman Kevin Bostwick. The Houghton native had two shots on goal and showed flashes of his offensive ability. One other shot just missed the net when he skated in on a 3-on-2 the Lions put together while shorthanded.

The good news ended there. Just 1:18 into the contest, the Sabres struck when Anthony Bilka beat Gloss. The Sabres also scored 1:37 into the second off a shot from Bronson Adams and 30 seconds into the third when Gianni Vitali scored, giving them cushions throughout the night that made it difficult for the Lions to stick with their gameplan.

The Sabres added two more goals in the first from Blaine Caton and Parker Colley to take a 3-0 lead into the locker room. Bryson Cecconi added an insurance tally 10:14 into the third to seal the victory.

“Marian’s very good team,” said Burcar. “They’ve been in the playoffs for the last four years. We know they have a strong powerplay coming in and they scored a minute and a half into the game 5-on-5. I don’t think that really fazed us. I think going down 3-0 after one was, was not the script that we wrote.”

Gloss made 32 saves in the loss.

Lions fall 6-2 on road

Looking for a better result Saturday, the Lions traveled to Fond du Lac to face the Sabres a second time. The hosts grabbed the game’s first three goals, including two on the power play, to put the Lions back on their heels.

Junior winger Sheldon Brett cut the lead to 3-1 with a power play tally of his own at 10:08. Freshman forward Tyler Perkins added an assist on the goal.

That was close as the Lions got on the scoreboard. The Sabres got two more tallies before the end of the period, including another power play goal, to take a 5-1 lead into the third.

Freshman forward Cooper Hoheisel cut the lead to three, 5-2, off another feed from Perkins at 8:26, for the Lions.

Marian added one more goal at 15:08 to seal the win.