The South Eastern Manitoba Hockey League finals begin next week but the Portage Islanders will not be involved. The back-to-back #1 seed in the regular season standings was bounced before the finals for the second straight year.

While they are disappointed with the way the season ended, forward Derrick Brooks says the series could've gone either way.

"The Ste. Anne Aces are a good team. It was a great series with a lot of back-and-forths. I thought, for the most part, we played pretty well throughout the series. Every game went to overtime or was within one goal. There were a lot of goals scored right down to the very end of the games, in the last two minutes. We were just, unfortunately, on the wrong side of them."

Brooks adds the Aces capitalized on all the mistakes the Islanders made and played almost flawlessly in those three games. He describes what the Islanders would've liked to do differently in the semi-final series.

"Giving up a goal in the last two minutes of a period was a killer. In the first game, we took a lot of penalties. We gave up two or three 5-on-3s," Brooks explains. "There were a couple of disallowed goals but that's uncontrollable. Thinking about the things we could control, we had some defensive zone breakdowns and allowed some odd-man rushes that gave them opportunities to put it in our net. There were a number of things to look back on that we'll want to do a better job of next season."

Portage finished the regular season with a record of 16-1-1 and won their first 15 games. With that being the case, Brooks says there were still a ton of positives to come from this season.

"We had a great regular season but that just goes to show how much tighter that playoff hockey is. We felt that Games 1, 2, and 3 all could've went our way but they just didn't. Bounces didn't go our way, or there was the odd error that we made that they were able to capitalize on."

Brooks believes they will be stronger than ever in the 2023-24 campaign. 

"We were a really tight group. We have a good young core that has been with us for a little bit now. We hope to get as many guys returning as we can but there also might be some new guys coming in," Brooks continues. "We hope to improve on this next year. We know as a group how much that stung us. It wasn't our year but we'll be coming back hungrier and looking to correct those mistakes that we made."

The Ste. Anne Aces will meet the Morden Bombers in the SEMHL finals.

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