You know, it used to be back in the day when you could not find parking at All Season Ice Arena in Naperville when Naperville North would face off against Naperville Central.

      But those days are just but a memory.

     Now, the combined team of Naperville (Naperville North, Naperville Central) is now tasked with carrying the torch of quality high school hockey out in the far west suburbs.

      As they continue to improve their game, they took on Neuqua Valley Saturday evening in Naperville and came away with a 4-0 victory.

     “Our players battle through a lot of being buried against the side walls, but they hung in there tonight,” Naperville coach Scott Matthews said. “We did a good job of staying out of the penalty box and got some goals in that third period which helped.”

      While Naperville was working on finding their scoring touch, Neuqua Valley, maybe one of the best-dressed teams in the Illini West, was busy trying to work on their breakout, advancing the puck through the neutral zone, setting up an offense and keeping Naperville from scoring.

     It is going to be a season for Neuqua Valley where they will be ‘Under Construction.’

     “We have been working on our structure in our defensive zone and how best to get the puck out of our own end,” Matthews said. “We can make all the mistakes we want to on the offensive zone. As long as we do not make them in our own end.”

      Naperville did the right things early on as they would keep the Wildcats off the scoresheet for all of 51 minutes. After a scoreless opening period, the home side would get on the scoreboard at the 10:15 mark of the middle period. Naperville so. fwd. Landon Connolly (Naperville Central) would take a pass from linemate Jacob Kistler, skate into slot area and let go a hard wrist shot which beat Wildcat goalie Elijah Jacknick and into the back of the net for the 1-0 lead which is how the middle period ended.

      “Our offense was a little slow last week,” Connolly said. "So, tonight we just wanted to get as many pucks to the net as we could. I got a lot of good passes from my teammates, and I got a lot of open space to shoot in the slot area a lot. I got a lot of second-chance opportunities tonight.”

      Naperville would make their presence known on offense over the final 17 minutes of play. They would score three times. Naperville made it 2-0 with 9:33 left when Connolly scored on a wrap-around chance. It became 3-0 when Connolly sent a pass to teammate Carter Wszolek who scored off a two-on-one chance with 4:00 remaining.

      Naperville closed out their scoring with an empty net goal from Connolly with :46 seconds remaining after Wildcats coach Jeff Salzbrunn pulled Jacknick in favor of a sixth attacker for the 4-0 advantage.

       “We were really strong on defense tonight I felt,” Connolly said. “Our defense got on them (Neuqua Valley) when they came into our end really quickly and our goalie (Sam Carleton, 31 saves) played great tonight.”