I’d imagine it was difficult waking up Monday morning and going to school if you were a Winchester High School hockey player. 

The Red & Black may have come out on the wrong side of a major end-of-game injustice in Sunday’s Division 1 state championship game. St. John’s Prep scored the game-winning goal with no time showing on the clock – something that isn’t supposed to happen in hockey unless the nine planets are in harmonic convergence. 

Now, they’d have to hear about it all day long from their friends and teachers. 

Curiously, though, it’s likely the Prep players weren’t 100 percent pleased either. You can’t be sincerely happy winning a game with that kind of a pall cast over it – coach Kristian Hanson’s “I don’t give a (bleep)” remark notwithstanding. 

The Eagles struggled for stretches, and even fell behind, 2-1, in the third period before storming back. They deserved a clean victory as much as Winchester’s grit and doggedness should have been similarly rewarded. 

This is bound to gnaw at both teams – albeit for diametrically different reasons. 

The frenetic final minute of that game was a race against time. The score was tied 2-2 and overtime was imminent. Nobody wants overtime. One flukey bounce and you’re sitting on the ice looking vacantly into space.

St. John’s was pressing. Winchester goalie Aiden Emerick was an acrobat in the net, casting aside shot after shot to the oohs and ahhs of both rooting sections. 

By the 45th minute, some of those Winchester kids looked mighty spent. The Prep’s superior depth was beginning to wear them down… well, except for Emerick. 

There were only about four or five seconds left when Brady Plaza caught up with a clearing shot and kept the puck in the Red & Black zone. He zipped a shot on Emerick, who was screened by Jake Vana. The rebound came out to Johnny Tighe, and in one motion, he knocked it into the net.

In the interest of full disclosure, I went to The Prep and still follow its teams religiously. As a Prep guy, I was happy. But as someone who covered high school sports for more than 20 years, I was not – even after the referee ruled it a good goal, and all through the post-game award ceremonies. 

The Eagles were celebrating all over the ice while the four referees (officials who, to that point, had called an almost flawless game) tried to figure out what to do. Their jobs couldn’t have been made easier with the scorer’s booth on the Winchester side of the ice.

In defense of the officials, that last play buzzed by like a bullet train. It was very easy to get wrapped up in the action and forget about the green light behind the net that signifies that “time’s up,” and that looked as if it had lit up a split second before Tighe shot the puck. 

You know what would have helped? Having a goal judge. He or she, stationed behind the net, could have seen the light, the scoreboard, and the action. He or she could have made a definitive determination.

Alas, goal judges were eliminated a few years ago, leaving it to the all-too-human observations of on-ice officials. Further, there is no access to the replays that prompted Winchester fans everywhere to take to social media to rail and rant against the play. So the referees were on a chunk of ice, floating away from the water’s edge, heading to heaven knows where.

The shame of it all isn’t that the referees may have had the call wrong, or that perhaps the Winchester fans flooded Facebook, X, and Instagram before these poor kids even had a chance to digest what had just happened. 

The shame of it all is regardless of what we may think happened, we’ll never know definitively. A team of boys wearing red and black will go to their graves feeling as if they were cheated.

And a team of kids in blue and white will know that while they won on the scoreboard, that outcome will forever be in doubt in the minds of most of the people who saw it.

It was the most imperfect of endings.