Winnipeg Ice take a Round 1 win over Blade in a WHL Heavyweight fight.

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Had Brennan Sonne had his way, the Saskatoon Blaze would have finished a two-game set against the Winnipeg Ice on Friday.

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“I wish I could have kept going,” said the Blaze head coach, who will face the Ice again Saturday night at 7 p.m. at the SaskTel Centre.

“Let’s go. Let’s go. We’re ready to rock.”

On Friday, the Blaze gave the visiting Ice a 6-3 decision before the crowd announced at 3,0003.

Scores did not indicate effort.

The results were certainly not there, but Sonne believed the performance level was up to par against the number one Canadian Hockey League team.

“We played really hard,” Sonne said. “Winnipeg is a one-miss team. You make one tiny mistake — you’re five feet off here, you miss one assignment there — and they’re so dangerous that you can’t play structurally perfect hockey.” We can’t play the game, but that’s kind of what happened tonight, we missed a play here, we missed something there and it ended up in our net, but All in all, I honestly thought we played really hard, I thought the game had chunks of momentum.

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“Other than some structural glitches, I was pretty happy with the game.”

Connor Roulette, Josh Pillar and Justin Ryze scored for Saskatoon to make it 2-6 on the power play.

Graham Seward, Conor Geekie, Ben Zloty, Ty Nash, Owen Pederson and Vladislav Shiloh scored for Winnipeg.

“We hadn’t seen Winnipeg yet, but they are ranked #1 in the country, so you are excited for the challenge. I thought,’ said Sonne. “It was just a few little things that ended up in our net.”

Austin Elliott lost with 14 saves.

Daniel Hauser made 30 stops to improve his season record to a perfect 16-0.

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“I thought we were[going]pretty consistently hard all night – really,” Sonne added. I won’t get down to this we had one game in two weeks so I can’t be 100% clear results are one thing and obviously it’s a results based business but purely results not performance It’s been a rollercoaster when we focus on we’ve been very focused on this dressing room performance and honestly I thought the performance was pretty solid and this is what we’ve played recently I thought it was one of the hardest games out there.”

dzary@postmedia.com