“We always say compete, bring our best, and be resilient,” Garton said. “It doesn’t matter who we’re playing, we’re going to play the same. We came in expecting it to be a hard game and knew they were going to bring their best.”

As the game got more intense in the third period — both teams started to play more physically and the Stars unleashed 28 shots on goal in the third period alone — both teams’ fans got progressively louder.

“I think our fans do a really good job of being loud,” Garton said. “But Breck had a bunch of fans here tonight so we needed them and I think it really helped us.”

Stars head coach Ryan LaMere echoed Garton’s message of consistency and resilience, no matter who they’re playing. Breaking it down into period by period wins has helped, focusing on winning each period, which then leads to favorable results at the end of the game.

“The first period tonight we won 1-0 so we celebrated that,” LaMere said. “It was a small win, but we also knew we had to get better the rest of the game. We felt we controlled the offense throughout the period but then needed to work on getting the quality chances we wanted. From there, we made a few adjustments to get more puck to the net and down low, and continually get better throughout the game.”

While the Mustangs’ season came to a close with Tuesday’s loss, the Stars move on to a tough Class 1A, Section 5 Championship game against a 23-3 Orono team that is seeded No. 1 and defeated Delano/Rockford 8-1 on Tuesday. The Stars suffered two-goal losses in both games against Orono during the regular season, but LaMere insists on solely looking to Thursday’s matchup.

“Orono is a really good team,” LaMere said. “They’re a very well-coached, well-structured team. In preparation, we watch video and talk about what we need to do to make the necessary changes in the game.”

LaMere credited the Stars’ success on focusing more on mental engagement and conversations in practice which help prepare them for games. In addition, LaMere is teaching his team to celebrate their past wins but use both the successes and failures to get better moving forward. LaMere said they’ll be ready to face Orono on Thursday.

“We’ve trained all year, we know what we’re doing, and we know our systems,” LaMere said. “Now it’s executing the small things. At the end of the day we’re going to make mistakes but we’re going to recover from them and in the end be so much better off. It should be a great game.”