GORHAM — It was still a few minutes before the start of the third period, but Mary Vaughan, the coach of the Gorham co-op girls’ hockey team, and her assistants were already on the bench. Waiting to get on the ice, the team was in the hands of captains Emerson Homa, Greta Grant and Katelyn Cyr.

“We say what we need to say, and let them do the rest. We don’t have a whole lot of control once they get out there (on the ice),” Vaughan said.

With some last-minute words from their captains, the Rams broke a tie early in the third period Thursday afternoon and held on for a 6-4 win over Brunswick at the University of Southern Maine Ice Arena.

With one week left in the regular season, Gorham is 10-4, while Brunswick is 7-7.

“Just keep our heads up,” Homa said of her message to her team before the third period. “We kind of have a bad habit of getting down on ourselves when the other team starts to score goals, so we just made sure to tell everyone we’ve got this.”

Brunswick scored a pair of goals late in the second period to knot the game at 3-3. Lauren Labbe’s goal at 14:18 of the second gave the Dragons momentum entering the final period.

The Rams, though, snatched momentum right back just 1:38 into the third when Homa scored a short-handed goal.

Homa finished with three goals and two assists, and now has 35 goals on the season.

“They’ve got a special player in (Homa). She plays the game well. She plays a 200-foot game. You make a mistake and she’s going to make you pay for it, and she did today,” Brunswick Coach Chris Ledwick said.

Brooklyn Sandstrom’s goal at 6:23 pushed Gorham’s lead to 5-3. After Labbe scored her third goal of the night at 13:24, Azalea Grant’s empty-net goal capped the scoring.

Gorham capitalized on a pair of power plays in the first period to build a 2-0 lead. Cyr scored on a rebound at 9:10, and Homa’s goal with one second left in the period gave the Rams a two-goal cushion.

“Our power play’s been pretty consistent this year. We’re getting different combinations of people in there, so it’s fun to see them working together,” Vaughan said. “Brunswick’s always a tough opponent. It wasn’t the prettiest, but we did what we needed to do.”

Labbe’s power-play goal at 8:15 of the second cut Gorham’s lead to 2-1, but Homa answered just nine seconds later for a 3-1 lead.

With a start time just after 4 p.m., Ledwick felt his team was a little flat over the first half of the game.

“The energy was not quite what we were hoping for, but I thought we competed better in the second half (of the game) than we did in the first,” Ledwick said.

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