KINGSTON, Ont -- Senior forward Christophe Lalonde of Mirabel, Que., scored twice in rapid succession and earned one assist as McGill outgunned the Royal Military College Paladins 5-3 in OUA men's hockey action at Constantine Arena, Friday. The result clinched a playoff berth for McGill -- for a 16th consecutive season -- and left RMC in jeopardy of missing post-season play.
 
Originally scheduled for a 7 p.m. start, the opening puck drop was postponed after the pre-game warm-up for two hours as the referees were believed to be stuck in a marathon three-hour traffic jam. Various news agencies reported that drivers on Highway 401 in Mississauga, Ont., were forced to navigate around a herd of cattle late Friday and into Saturday after the animals got loose from a transport truck that struck a barrier. The traffic was backed up all the way past Kingston.
 
"It was tough for our group to stay focused for the whole 60 minutes after everything that happened," said alternate captain Dominic Talbot-Tassi, who waited with his teammates in uncertainty before the officials finally arrived. "It was crazy. We thought it would last for 45 minutes at most. The majority of our guys got completely undressed (out of their hockey gear) and some were ready to pack their gear and leave. But then we were told we had to wait until 9:30 p.m. to get a final decision (on whether the game was a go or not). And after all that, we finally got the confirmation that the referees had arrived and we had to play."

But that did nothing to slow Lalonde who got his side off to a thunderous start, striking twice in a three-minute interval, including his first on a power-play 34 seconds after the opening whistle. Assisting on both occasions were linemates Samuel Tremblay and Antoine Dufort-Plante.
 
RMC responded through Nicholas Boddy who reduced the deficit to 2-1 at the 5:32 mark. But a Dufort-Plante power-play tally at 14:55 of the first period, via passes from Talbot-Tassi and Nikolas Brouillard, restored the two-goal advantage.
 
Lalonde's offensive prowess allowed McGill to head into the first intermission with a 3-1 lead, which the team extended to 4-1 after two. The eventual game-winner came off the stick of Ryan Penny, a second-year AHL transfer from Fall River, N.S., who took a pass from Keanu Yamamoto and tucked away a neat one-two play at 9:19 of the second period. It was the 6-foot-2 centre's third goal of the season.

The Paladins scored twice in the final stanza with both coming from the stick of Cole Noble but Tremblay added a disputed empty net-marker with 18 seconds left. The puck had been flipped out of the McGill zone by Talbot-Tassi and appeared to strike something near the top of the boards, possibly a glove of one of the players at the bench. It dropped down near centre ice and Tremblay struck pay-dirt with a long-distance shot from about 100 feet.
 
Talbot-Tassi, a 5-foot-9 rearguard from Mascouche, Que.,  collected his second assist on that goal to finally break the McGill all-time points record for defencemen in regular season play. The fifth-year mining engineer now owns a career dossier of 131 points, including 102 assists in 135 OUA games. He surpassed the standard set by Marc-André Dorion, who tallied a 23-107-130  total in 105 league games from 2008 to 2012.
 
"When you're so close to beating the record, you don't want to think about it. But at the same time, everything is reminding you of it," the veteran admitted as his two-point soiree halted an eight-game pointless streak. "And you always think about it. We were also in a slump team-wise. We weren't scoring many goals."
 
McGill held a 38-29 edge in shots as rookie goaltender Emanuel Vella of Toronto, made his sixth regular season start for the victory. He made 26 saves and improved his record to 3-3.

RMC netminder Brad Van Schbert turned away 33 in a losing cause. He also took one of 11 penalties doled out to the Paladins, who self-destructed down the stretch, taking six infractions in the final seven minutes while clinging to a one-goal deficit.

McGill went a respectable 2-for-8 on the power-play and successfully quashed all three shorthanded situations.
 
The result ended RMC's short-lived one-game win streak against McGill, which had stood since last November in a 3-2 win -- their first in 33 attempts against McGill, which improved its lifetime record to 72-9-4 against the Paladins.
 
With five games remaining before playoffs, McGill (13-8-2) consolidated its hold on fourth place in the OUA East, trailing third-place Ottawa (15-6-3) by five points with a game in hand. Meanwhile RMC tumbled to ninth with a 7-15-1 record and sit two points in arrears of Nipissing (7-14-3), which currently holds down the last playoff berth.
 
With the exceptionally late start, both teams will have even less turnaround time as they return to the ice in under 24 hours. The Paladins (7-15-1) host Queen's (10-11-2) at home on Saturday, while McGill (13-8-2), forced into an impromptu overnight hotel stay because of strict regulations regarding their bus-driver's working hours, will make the three-hour trip back to Montreal in the morning. They will host Nipissing (7-14-3) in the first of a home-and-home series that begins on Saturday at McConnell Arena at 7 p.m.

McGILL MURMURS: The lengthy pre-game delay forced McGill head coach Liam Heelis to make the best of a challenging situation during the game. He asked a staff member to go with the team bus for some groceries so that his troops would have nourishment during the intermissions. Then, in what was no doubt a hockey first, associate coach Mike Cucinotta had to use a cell phone behind the bench to make impromptu hotel arrangements between calling out the next shift of defensive pairings.