George Porto was pissed, and his head coach knew it.
Because what Dave Sagnella was doing, as calculated and wise as it may have been, was hardly the easiest strategy to get through to a group of high school hockey players.
Lyman Hall’s head coach was asking his team — in the biggest game of the season to date, against the top team in Connecticut — to hold itself back. Sagnella wasn’t throwing the game, per se. But he was getting pretty close. The Trojans' 2-3 forecheck, by far the more effective of their two systems? Lyman Hall didn’t use it. Pinching in the offensive zone? “Didn’t allow them to at all,” Sagnella said. “At all.” For all intents and purposes, the Trojans were allowing Cheshire, a Southern Connecticut Conference rival and the prohibitive Division II state title favorite, to just walk out of its zone.
Porto couldn’t believe it.
We need to show them what we have right now, the junior forward thought to himself. We need to beat them right now.
Lyman Hall, predictably, did not. The Rams took that Feb. 14 matchup, 4-1, the 15th victory in what became a 21-game winning streak for Anthony Giusto’s powerhouse team, which ran as New England Hockey Journal’s top-ranked DII outfit almost all season and was so good that many coaches in Connecticut felt it should’ve been competing in the state’s top division.
Sagnella couldn’t have been happier. The Trojans played quite well, he thought, and they weren’t even showing all of their cards. They’d learned what they needed to learn about the state’s top team — the one Sagnella knew Lyman Hall would have to face again to get where it wanted to go.
“He said, and I’ll quote him: ‘I’m thinking big picture,’” Porto remembered.
Sagnella is not going to tell you he’s a genius. But as Lyman Hall leaves this season with its first Division II state championship — and first title of any kind as an independent program — the seventh-year head coach sure looks like a fortune teller. The Trojans did, indeed, need to get through Cheshire in the state tournament to reach the top of the mountain. In a 4-1 upset in the semifinal at Quinnipiac, Lyman Hall stunned the Rams with an entirely different game plan than the one it lost with in February.
The thought process was simple enough. Lyman Hall knew Cheshire wanted to stretch the ice. “They get the puck in their zone, they’re looking for the breakaway pass every time,” senior captain Nate D’Amico said. In the regular-season matchup, the Trojans would only use their ‘aggressive’ forecheck, which allowed the Rams to do what they wanted. When they inevitably met again in the postseason? That’s when they’d use the 2-3 forecheck, which clogged the neutral zone and prevented Cheshire from connecting on stretch passes. “We’re gonna throw our best stuff at them,” D’Amico said, “and they’re not going to be ready for it.”
But try telling a 17-year-old to wait a month to empty the clip against a chief rival.
“Personally?” Porto said. “I was pretty upset about it.”
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Sagnella could tell his star junior (23 goals, 19 assists) was frustrated. The night after the loss to Cheshire, he pulled Porto aside after practice. You really got to see what I’m seeing right now, Sagnella told him. This is not the biggest deal in the world. We will see them again. Porto eventually calmed down, and Lyman Hall proceeded to finish the regular season 13-6-1, good enough for the No. 4 seed in the state tournament. The Trojans easily handled the first two rounds (a 7-4 win over Glastonbury and a 4-0 victory over Guilford) to reach Quinnipiac.
Their opponent in the state semifinal?
“He was absolutely right,” Porto said. “Exactly what he said was gonna happen.”
Cheshire entered the final four at M&T Bank Arena averaging 4.2 goals per game. Lyman Hall held the Rams to one. After Cheshire took the lead in the second period on a power-play goal, Porto tied it directly off the ensuing face-off. The Trojans proceeded to dominate the third period, in which sophomore Liam Laffin (26 goals, 18 assists) scored the game-winner, and Porto potted another to seal it. Senior goalie Owen Hamm, meanwhile, sat comfy at the other end.
“They only had like four shots,” Hamm said of the third period. “We just dominated.”
The 2-3 forecheck — and the ensuing chaos it created in the neutral zone — was the biggest reason why. Whereas Cheshire was invited to break out of its zone in the first meeting, the Rams didn’t know what hit them at Quinnipiac.
“I think they iced the puck 15 times,” D’Amico said.
Exactly a week before the February meeting with Cheshire, Sagnella did something arguably even bolder than willingly hamstringing his team against a top opponent. Following a loss to Trumbull, he addressed the team in the locker room in full uniform — on the road, after a game that started at 7:45 p.m. — for an hour and a half.
From the beginning, Sagnella knew he had a team that could compete for a state title. His eight-player class of 2027, which includes Porto, led the Trojans to an impressive season in 2024-25. Porto and Co. were sophomores then. Now juniors with another year of experience — and with D’Amico and Hamm around for one last ride — the Trojans considered 2025-26 the season they’d been building for. A 9-1-1 start proved Lyman Hall was what it thought it would be.
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But the Trojans were still just three years removed from finishing 3-16-1 in 2022-23. They had no idea how to handle their newfound status.
“You have to learn,” Sagnella said, “how to be the hunted.”
Sagnella saw this early. Before a practice in late January, he tried to be proactive instead of reactive and took 15 minutes to urge his players to understand they were no longer a chippy underdog; they were about to get everyone’s best shot. Two weeks later, Lyman Hall had lost three games in a row. The losing streak’s finale was the disastrous 6-5 defeat at Trumbull; the Trojans allowed four unanswered goals in the third period. Players returned to the locker room and slammed their sticks. Porto slammed his helmet, and plenty more were screaming. Then Sagnella walked in, and no one left for another 90 minutes.
“It was definitely surprising,” D’Amico (11 goals, 19 assists) said of the marathon seminar. “Like: ‘Wow, this just happened.’”
Sagnella prescribed the sudden bug that had befallen his team to exactly what he’d warned against — Lyman Hall could no longer operate as an underdog.
“He was very honest with us. He said we’re fooling around. We’re not taking teams as strong as we should be,” Porto said. “And something needs to change, or we’re not going to make it to Quinnipiac.”
Lyman Hall’s last trip to M&T Bank Arena for the state final four was in 2021-2022. Not even D’Amico and Hamm were on the team then.
Now reaching Quinnipiac was the expectation. The Trojans took the lessons from their 90-minute meeting and ran with them right away; in a showdown with Amity directly following the loss to Trumbull, Lyman Hall scored twice in the final 30 seconds to steal a 3-2 victory.
“We were always used to doing the hunting,” D’Amico said. “The idea of being the hunted really made us realize that we have a shot at winning this thing. And if we just play our game, we’ll be fine.”
All along, any potential run to a state title was supposed to mean going through both Cheshire and the East Haven Co-op, the defending champion and the clear No. 2 team in DII (the Yellowjackets, like the Rams, were thought to be too good for the state’s second tier). This was the tension at the core of Sagnella’s message — the Trojans may have been the ‘hunted’ relative to the bottom of Connecticut, but they were still the ‘hunter’ relative to Cheshire and East Haven.
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Somehow, Lyman Hall faced neither in its state title bout on March 20. Instead, 11th-seeded Conard, in the midst of a furious run that included a stunning semifinal upset of East Haven, stood across from the Trojans. Lyman Hall was indeed the favorite as it played for a championship — exactly the dynamic Sagnella had prepared his team for. The Trojans — warned of the danger of the group they were facing by Sagnella, who was an assistant in 2013 on a 13-seeded Daniel Hand team that won the title — took care of Conard. Lyman Hall won 5-2.
“It’s amazing how many talks you have with your players, trying to prepare them for the future,” Sagnella said. “It’s pretty neat how it comes full circle.”
