Boyer remembers THE GOAL!

By GREGG DRINNAN
Daily News Sports Editor
It was May 17, 1992.
The Kamloops Blazers had blown a 3-0 lead and now were tied 5-5 with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in the final game of the 1992 Memorial Cup tournament in Seattle.
It was late in the third period when Zac Boyer, a 20-year-old winger who was born in Inuvik, scored the goal that gave the Blazers the WHL franchise’s first of three Memorial Cups in four seasons.
“It was an amazing accomplishment as a team,” Boyer said Tuesday from North Carolina after the Blazers announced that he will be saluted as a Blazer Legend on March 7. “I don’t care who scored that goal. It never mattered to me.”
Boyer remembers the goal as though it happened yesterday.
“Scott Niedermayer got tripped up at the red line and they had a 3-on-1 on Darryl Sydor . . . I remember that distinctly,” Boyer said, referring to two Kamloops defencemen who now are in the NHL. “(Forward) Ed Patterson came to the bench throwing up from heat exhaustion. I was the first guy at the door.
“Niedermayer gets the puck inside the blue line and I guess the rest is history.”
Noticing that Sault Ste. Marie goaltender Kevin Hodson was well out front of his crease, Boyer, a 40-goal man that season, skated around Hodson and slid the puck into the net.
“I went around him and it barely slid in,” Boyer said of what was his tournament-high fifth goal. It came at 19:45 of the third period.
“Tom Renney sent me an email a while ago,” Boyer said. “He said, ‘I watched that the other day and that thing just barely got in there.’ ”
Renney, the head coach of the NHL’s New York Rangers, was the Blazers’ head coach in 1991-92.
“But, really, I was just in the right place at the right time,” Boyer concluded.