The Parkland Rangers were a little over two minutes away from their first victory of the young Manitoba U188 AAA Hockey League season, but instead had to settle for a single point in an overtime loss to the Eastman Selects, Saturday.

Eastman scored a 4-3 come-from-behind overtime win, Saturday, erasing a 3-2 deficit with 2:08 remaining in the third period and netting the winner, 3:21 into the extra session.

Despite the loss, Rangers head coach Tyler Carefoot felt it was a great game for his young squad. But he also had high praise for the Selects.

“I like the way Eastman plays. They have an identity. I think their identity is just they’ve got nobody that’s flashy. They just go out and they out work you, they out hustle you, they do all the little things that make a team very efficient,” he said. “No disrespect to their lineup, but there’s no rock stars there. They’re all the same. They go out and out hustle you. They’re just very efficient.”

Carefoot felt the Rangers matched that efficiency in Saturday’s game and knew what to expect going into Sunday’s contest.

But as well as the Rangers played, they failed to equal Eastman’s offensive output, falling 10-1.

“There’s probably a few that we’d like back, but that’s the game. It’s all about minimizing our mistakes,” Carefoot said. “We’re going to learn from this. We want to be a team that is hard to play against. We want to be a team that is going to be just very efficient with all the little things that makes a team have success. We want to be Eastman, plain and simple.”

Carefoot credits his players for not quitting even as the score got away from them.

Given how young the Rangers are, Carefoot feels Sunday’s loss will be a good learning experience for his team.

“We’re learning something every period. It’s still early in the season, so there’s still runway left and we’re going to keep growing.” he said. “Hopefully we can find ways to be a little more efficient. We know we can compete with teams in our league. We proved that Saturday night. Eastman plays a hard brand of hockey and are very disciplined in their structure and details. We will keep moving forward.”

On Saturday, the Rangers play the 0-2-0-0 Wild in Winnipeg at 4:15 p.m., before heading to Teulon, Sunday, for a date with the 2-2-0-0 Interlake Lightning at 1:30 p.m.