Tanner Ludtke and Cole Crusberg-Roseen both scored on the man advantage but the Fargo Force swept the two-game weekend set against the Stars with a 3-2 win on Saturday night.
Lincoln (25-15-2) outshot Fargo (30-8-1-3), 35-33, but could not regain the lead after tying things up in the second. JP Turner scored the game-winner for the Force on a wraparound low backhander that caught the stick of Stars netminder Cameron Whitehead and popped up over his shoulder and into the back of the net at 17:42 of the third.
"I told the guys," head coach Rocky Russo said, "that sometimes the hard part about sports is that you coach your guys to play a certain way and then they do play the way you ask them to play and then they don't get the results that they are hoping for. I just said that our belief for what we do and why we do it has to be strong enough to understand that we played the right way tonight."
Ludtke scored his 22nd of the season early in the first to put the Stars on the board first. He received a backhand pass from Doug Grimes from beneath the goal line and one-timed it past Fargo goaltender Matej Marinov. That goal at the 2:33 mark gave Ludtke his ninth power-play goal, which leads the Stars and is tied for third-most in the USHL.
Fargo evened the game up 1:58 later on a give-and-go between Jakob Stender and Charlie Russell as Stender cashed in off a pass from behind the net. Russell redirected a shot at the 17:13 mark to give the Force a 2-1 lead.
The Stars bounced back from being outshot 19-9 in the first to outshoot the Force 27-14 the rest of the way. They scored the equalizer at the 6:48 mark of the second when Crusberg-Roseen one-timed a cross-ice feed from Henry Nelson for the Stars' second power-play goal of the game.
In addition to a pair of goals on the man advantage Lincoln's special teams also produced another perfect performance on the penalty kill, silencing all three Fargo power plays. The Stars penalty kill went a perfect five-for-five in the two games with the Force. Lincoln leads the USHL with an 84.7-percent penalty-kill percentage
The Stars wrap up the weekend with a 3:05 p.m. game on Sunday against the Sioux City Musketeers at the Tyson Events Center. Lincoln is 3-2 against Sioux City this season, including sweeping a pair of games against them two weekends ago.
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