MUSKEGON – All season long, the Muskegon Lumberjacks (and every other team in the USHL Eastern Conference) have been chasing the Chicago Steel.

The same was true last season, when the Jacks were in second place and got close to the first-place Steel in the standings, but never caught the Windy City squad.

Chicago has been the dominant league power in recent years, winning two straight Anderson Cups (top regular season team) and last year’s Clark Cup (playoff champion).

But the Jacks finally caught the Steel on Saturday, moving into a tie for first place with Chicago at 46 points apiece after their 4-0 win over Youngstown.

The tie at the top has occurred because the Jacks and Steel have been moving in opposite directions.

After a terrible start to the season, the Lumberjacks have won 19 of their past 22 games, and in January have posted a sparking 7-0-1 record.

Chicago, meanwhile, has been a very rare tailspin all month, posting a 1-3-1 record with a slightly lighter schedule. To understand how infrequently the Steel lose, consider that their record, even after their recent slide, is 20-7-6, meaning they only lost four games in the first three months of the season.

Despite that, Muskegon Coach Mike Hamilton knows the Steel won’t be down for long.

“They’ve been playing without Adam Fantilli, probably one of the best players in the league,” he said. “I think he just came back this past weekend. That was something that I’m sure threw them into a little bit of a tailspin.

“They’re a great hockey team. We all know the road through the playoffs is going to have to go through them. We have a lot of respect for what they’ve done.”

While Chicago has lost three of its last four games, the Lumberjacks have shown a great ability to avoid any sort of losing streak at all.

Muskegon has not lost two games in a row since last October. The Jacks’ ability to bounce back from losses was illustrated on Saturday, when they posted the shutout of Youngstown one night after a disappointing 4-3 overtime loss to the Phantoms.

The Lumberjacks don’t let losses get them down, and that’s a big psychological edge for a team that’s trying to win the top spot in the conference.

“Everyone here hates to lose,” Hamilton said about his team. “That can be seen in our practices. We’ve built in a lot of competition drills, with winners and losers. The winning team gloats and the losing team sulks. These guys enjoy winning. Losing two in a row is definitely something we don’t want to do. We’ve had a refocus. We don’t have to go back very far to ask ourselves, remember that feeling?”

The Jacks and Chicago may be in a tie for the top spot, but the race is probably going to be determined by the outcome of games against other teams.

The Jacks and Steel only meet four more times this season, on Feb. 25-26 in Chicago, and on April 22 and 23 in a home-and-home series in the last two games of the regular season.

Meanwhile, the Lumberjacks will try to keep up their incredible winning pace going this weekend when they visit Green Bay on Friday and Saturday night. The following weekend they will play a Friday game in Plymouth, Michigan against Team USA, then will return home on Feb. 11-12 for two games against Madison.

Hamilton calls this weekend’s games in Green Bay the biggest of the season so far, because his team has climbed into a tie for first, and the whole league has noticed.

“Going into Green Bay for two games, against a really good hockey team, this weekend is the most important weekend,” the coach said. “We’re going to try to keep the train rolling. We kind of hung out in the weeds for a little while, but a lot of people look at the standings and they see that we’ve arrived. Some noise has been made, and now opponents will use us as a benchmark, and we will see their best goalies every game.

“We have to prove that we belong where we’re at.”

Zadorozhnyy out due to lingering COVID symptoms

A lot of fans have probably wondered about goalie Platon Zadorozhnyy, whose play since coming to the team in October has greatly settled the goaltending situation.

Zadorozhnyy has not played since Jan. 7 in Green Bay, when the Jacks beat the Gamblers 10-6. He was pulled after the second period and has not seen game time since then.

It turns out that he’s been suffering from some lingering symptoms involved with a case of COVID he had last summer. He has left the team for a while to get treatment elsewhere, according to Hamilton.

There’s no telling at this point when he might return.

“It’s COVID, longer-term issues, post-COVID issues,” the coach said. “I think it’s going to be a little while. This affects different people different ways. He had a lot of fatigue issues and stuff like that. He was having a hard time keeping up with the day-to-day schedule. It goes way back to when he got it over the summer. It was something we were trying to manage, but it just kept getting worse.”

The loss of Zadorozhnyy is a blow for the Lumberjacks, because of the way he had been playing, with a 9-4 record and a 3.11 goals against average.

The silver lining is that the Jacks have been carrying three goalies for the past few months, which is unusual. They signed another Russian, Aleksander Kuleshov, a few weeks after getting Zadorozhnyy, and kept rooking Cameron Korpi on the roster because they liked his potential.

Both have been playing well in recent weeks, so the Lumberjacks still feel good about their goaltending situation.

Kuleshov is 7-1-1 with a 3.07 GAA, while Korpi (who posted his first career shutout on Saturday night) is 4-2-1 with a 2.86 GAA.

“We are reaping the benefits (of having three goalies),” Hamilton said. “We brought in two world class Russian goalies, which raised the bar for Korpi. It took some pressure off him early on, so he could spend more time with the goalie coach, and we’re all seeing the benefit of that now.”

Friday’s highlight-reel goals

The Lumberjacks were definitely not happy last Friday night, when a spate of third period penalties led to a 4-3 overtime loss to Youngstown and the end to their eight-game winning streak.

Lost in the gloom of that defeat were two very pretty, highlight-reel goals scored by the Lumberjacks.

The first came at 6:39 of the third period, when the Phantoms had a power play. The Youngstown goalie attempted to clear the puck away to a teammate, but Muskegon’s Quinn Hutson swooped in out of nowhere, intercepted the pass and put the puck in the net for a shorthanded goal.

The other came a little while later when defenseman Jacob Guevin got the puck near his own goal and sent an incredible pass three-quarters of the way down the ice, through traffic, to forward Ben Strinden, who received the puck in stride just outside the blue line, skated in and put a high shot into the net.

Guevin’s pass was a perfect illustration of why he recently became the Lumberjacks’ all-time top point producer among defensemen. He’s the Lumberjacks’ super-talented point guard who sets up a ton of goals with his ability to see the ice, read plays and make perfect passes that lead to goals.

Guevin currently has four goals and an amazing 29 assists this season.

“His ability to make great first passes and see plays develop is elite,” Hamilton said. “He makes breakouts look easy. It’s amazing. He passed to Strinden in stride on Friday. That was a dart.”