The Highway 7 rivalry might simmer on the back burner every now and then, but it doesn't take much to get it back to a full boil.
This year it seems a post-goal celebration by the Rangers Jeremy Bracco last Monday in Kitchener is what cranked up the heat.
"I think there were some things happened in that last game with some disrespect on their end and our guys know it ... there's some certain individuals over there that play a certain way and do certain things after they score, but it's a long year," Storm coach Jarrod Skalde said Sunday as the two teams met again.
In that game, Bracco slid on one knee towards the Guelph bench and pumped his arm in celebration after he scored a goal.
"It's Kitchener-Guelph so emotions are going to be high," Skalde said.
In the first meeting between the two teams since that incident, Kitchener beat Guelph 3-2 Sunday afternoon at the Sleeman Centre.
The game was Guelph's sixth loss in a row.
It had its share of elevated emotion, including a hard hit on Bracco in the second period by the Storm's Nate Schnarr for which the Storm rookie received a five-minute major for a head check.
There were also stitches for a pair of Storm players from errant high sticks, a fight between Guelph's Matt Hotchkiss and Kitchener's Connor Hall, and Storm assistant coach Todd Harvey got kicked out late in the third for abuse of an officia, namely referee Chris Carnegie.
"They were definitely up for the game and using (last Monday) as a motivation," said the Rangers' Adam Mascherin, who led the Kitchener attack with a goal and two assists.
"I feel you live for those games. That's what you train three hours in the summer for, for games like that," Mascherin said
Guelph's Isaac Ratcliffe, one of the Storm's better performers on the day, took six stitches from an errant high stick late in the game.
He said the rivalry is a real thing.
"You could tell from the first shift, with all the bodies being thrown around," said Ratcliffe, who had one of Guelph's goals. "If you don't know it, you'd better get off the ice."
He said the Bracco incident from a week ago was on the team's mind, but not to the point of letting it distract from the main objective of winning the game.
"It was a motivating factor for sure, but we try not to think about it and go out there and play ... We weren't trying to focus on one player, we're just trying to win the game," Ratcliffe said.
Of course Schnarrzy got him pretty well there too," he said of the hit.
Perhaps all the emotion worked against the Storm, who gave up a pair of power play goals.
"If we're going to take penalties, we'd better start killing them," Skalde said.
"We've got to control our emotions. I know this is Kitchener, with the rivalry, and it's a team you want to beat. But you have to play with controlled emotion," Skalde said.
After a sloppy first period, it turned into a pretty decent hockey game.
Kitchener led 1-0 after the first and 3-1 after two.
A Ryan Merkley goal with 1:24 left in the third period made for an exciting finish, but the Storm couldn't mount any good scoring chances from the danger zone around the Kitchener net, which was pretty much the story of the game for Guelph.
Most of their offence, and shots, came from the perimeter, a fact not lost on Skalde.
"I don't think we played enough on the inside, especially in the first period," the coach said. "We looked like passengers out there."
The Storm will play three-in-three next weekend: Friday at home to North Bay, Saturday in Barrie and Sunday in Oshawa.
