Published December 13 BY MIKE JOHNSON (Kenosha News)

PLEASANT PRAIRIE — Tommy Laken, the senior goalie for the Kenosha Unified hockey team, isn’t much for words.

After his superb 41-save shutout led the Thunder to a watershed 3-0 Classic Eight Conference win over Arrowhead at the Pleasant Prairie IcePlex on Saturday night, Laken was asked how the win felt for the program. He paused for a moment then delivered a two-word answer that spoke volumes.

‘It’s new’

“It’s new,” Laken said.

Indeed, it’s been a long time since the Thunder have had a weekend this successful, if ever. After going 0-7 in Classic Eight play last season, Kenosha (3-2-1 overall) has yet to drop a conference decision after two games this year. Saturday’s win came on the heels of Friday’s 2-2 road tie against Marquette.

Arrowhead and Marquette, two of the Classic Eight’s traditional powers, quite frankly would’ve had Kenosha defeated before the Zamboni resurfaced the ice even once in most years past. The teams beat Kenosha by an aggregate 10-1 score in two games last season, but this year is different.

“Typically, (our program) has been kind of the doormat of the Classic Eight, really,” fifth-year Thunder coach JR Litkey admitted. “But I think last year we played a lot of really good games, just kind of fell short. Now we’re winning those games.”

Has there been a better weekend than this, at least during Litkey’s tenure?

“To my knowledge, this is probably the biggest weekend for the Thunder program,” he said.

To be fair, the Warhawks (2-3-0 overall, 1-2-0 Classic Eight) dominated puck possession in Saturday’s game. Arrowhead outshot Kenosha 41-19, but Laken proved to be the equalizer and the Thunder made the most of their limited scoring chances.

Top lines deliver

Kenosha’s top two lines accounted for all the scoring, with all three goals coming in even-strength situations.

With 9 minutes, 39 seconds left in the first period, the second line did some nice dirty work when Cameron Kroncke and Hunter Kaden forced a turnover in the Warhawks’ zone. The puck found the stick of sophomore Max Maegaard right in the slot, and he buried it off the post past Arrowhead goalie JJ Gerlach.

“He adds another dynamic to our lines and kind of stabilizes our two lines,” Litkey said of Maegaard. “In the past couple years we had kind of like a line-and-a-half.”

The top line of Nick Elsen, Peyton Phillips and Anthony Svoboda completed a beautiful tic-tac-toe passing sequence just over three minutes later, with Svoboda tapping the puck into an open net and giving the Thunder a 2-0 lead going into the first intermission.

Then early in the second period, Laken made arguably the game’s biggest play.

The Thunder had weathered a 5-on-3 Arrowhead power play late in the first, and a Warhawks’ penalty put things into a 4-on-4 situation early in the second. With 15:50 left in the period, Arrowhead’s Ben Dvorak found himself completely open in front of the net on a backdoor feed, but Laken made an incredible, last-ditch sliding toe save to thwart what looked like a sure goal.

“That’s a game-changer,” said Litkey, who described the save as “unreal.”

“At that point, it could’ve been 2-1, and we kept the two-goal lead.”

Kaden made it 3-0 with three minutes left in the second period off assists from Maegaard and Brett DeLaat, and Laken easily stopped a penalty shot awarded to Arrowhead’s Caleb Beversdorf with just 1.7 ticks left in the second.

Arrowhead continued to pepper Laken with shots in the third against a clearly tired Kenosha team, but the Thunder did a nice job shrinking the zone and forcing most of the shots to come from low-quality areas, and Laken handled them all without incident.

“I (faced) a (few) too many shots,” Laken said. “I didn’t let any in, so I guess that’s good.”