Friday night’s game wasn’t quite what Cyclone Hockey expected.

Last year the Cyclones won their first eight games and scored 31 goals in their first two games.

This year, they lost their season opener.

Cyclone Hockey began its season with a disappointing and shocking 5-3 loss to Missouri on Friday in the Ames/ISU Ice Arena.

“That hasn’t happened for a long time . We’re used to winning the opening series,” said coach Al Murdoch. “I knew we were going to have a better squad, so I wanted our opening series to be tougher. I didn’t want it to be a pushover.”

In contrast to last season’s 13-0 drubbing of Nebraska, it wasn’t until junior Allen Raushel scored with 10 seconds remaining in the first period of Saturday night’s rematch that the Cyclones captured their first lead of the season.

Once they grabbed the lead, they showed signs of last year when they dominated their opponents, as they went on to win 7-4.

“It’s one thing to lose a game in the opening weekend, it’s another thing to be swept,” Murdoch said. “We like to sweep teams at home, and we’ll get the young guys going.”

The Cyclones loss Friday was partly because of the team’s inability to adjust to new rule changes. Both teams combined for 31 penalties on Friday, and 42 on Saturday because of a change in the rules.

“The penalties played a huge part in [the loss],” Raushel said. “We’re all used to playing hard-nosed kind of rough hockey, and we come out and they change the rules cold turkey. It took us a little bit to get used to it, and it still will take us a little bit.”

The large increase in the number of penalties from last season stems from rule changes regarding stick contact with an opponent adopted worldwide in the sport of hockey. This has led to an increase in the amount of interference, slashing and illegal-contact penalties.

“USA hockey and international hockey are trying to get hockey back to where it used to be – a fast, hard-hitting game and not so much of the holding and the cheap stuff,” said junior Jayson Peterson. “It’s definitely a good change, but it’s an adjustment for us.”

Although the number of penalties was greater than normal Saturday, the Cyclones were able to succeed because they started to develop an area of their game that was not present on Friday – team chemistry.

Friday’s game was not only the first game of the season, but it was also the Cyclones first time on the ice as a “team.” Tryouts went through Wednesday of last week, and culminated with an intrasquad game between the freshmen and the veterans, leaving no time for the team to practice.

“On an opening weekend when you have so many penalties, all of a sudden [the freshmen] are thrown into power play situations and penalty killing situations that they haven’t a clue what everyone else is doing,” Murdoch said.

As Saturday’s game wore on, the Cyclones pulled it together and overcame the penalties.

“We made leaps and bounds,” Raushel said. “We started off on Friday night not even being a team yet. Then Friday night we saw the penalties and we started to come together a little bit because we had some adversity. I think tonight we gelled very well – we had to in order to win [Saturday’s] game.”