BUFFALO, N.Y. -- When the proverbial second season began for the No. 9 Robert Morris women's hockey team, they treated it exactly the way head coach Paul Colontino wanted them to: by ending somebody else's.

The Colonials (21-7-4, 14-3-3) ramped up their relentless attack early and often, and rolled past Penn State, 7-2, in their College Hockey America (CHA) Tournament Semifinal at the HarborCenter Friday afternoon. Jessica Gazzola got on the board in another postseason game, Caitlyn Sadowy scored twice and Natalie Marcuzzi delivered the game-winner, as they provided a steady, and balanced, diet of offense in the form of five unanswered goals overlapping the first two periods.

"Everybody views the season a little bit differently. This group, for whatever reason, when the regular season is over, and they say 'it's a brand new season,' they literally treat it like a brand new season," Colontino said. "They have the same energy now that they had in September, which is a testament to how physically, but more importantly, how mentally tough that group is."

Gazzola needed just 75 seconds to bury her third goal in as many CHA Tournament games, thanks to her own diligence and some elbow grease from Amanda Pantaleo and Lexi Templeman deep in the Nittany Lions' zone.

"Playoff hockey is playoff hockey, and the team just gets so excited and ready to go," said Gazzola regarding her fifth of the season. "Pants popped it up to Lexi, and Lexi took a great shot in front, and I put the rebound in. It just comes from working off each other, and we did a great job today."

"A lot of big games, she's just there. She's on the ball. That's what she does. We're looking forward to tomorrow with her," Colontino smiled.

After PSU (10-15-11) answered with a power play goal 4:54 into the game, an RMU response, also, did not take long. Four minutes later, Sadowy got a greasy goal of her own, banging a loose puck past Hannah Ehresmann, with support from Marcuzzi, to give the regular-season champs the lead for good.

The Colonials continued to press, ultimately turning an early 5-2 shot deficit into a 13-7 advantage through one period, and Sadowy set up Marcuzzi for a right-side wrist shot through traffic that made it a 3-1 game with 4:05 to play.

"I feel good, but the team came out flying, and we knew that's what we had to do," the sophomore said after netting her fourth of the campaign. "It was exciting, and it was a lot of fun to make a difference, but I know we did it as a team."

"They were awesome. Phenomenal," Colontino said of his third and fourth lines. "We pride ourselves on making sure everybody's ready, but the players also pride themselves on knowing they've got to bring something to the table. And that's a huge part of it. They had some awesome shifts, and some awesome goals."

Although the Nittany Lions, bolstered by Ehresmann, have been known as a stubborn defensive bunch, it was Robert Morris that did the suffocating in the second period. Amber Rennie finished off her 16th goal of the season just 2:41 into the middle frame thanks to some tic-tac-toe passing by Brittany Howard and Jaycee Gebhard.

That would be all for the all-conference goaltender for the time being, but when Ehresmann was forced to return after an injury to backup Chantal Burke, Howard greeted her with one of her textbook lasers from the right wing circle, which snuck through for a 5-1 lead.

"We knew she was a good goalie, and the goals weren't going to come easily," Gazzola said. "We were taking as many shots as we could, and the pucks that get to the net, go in [when you do that]."

Thus far, the Rennie-Gebhard-Howard trio has combined for 113 points (53 goals, 60 assists) in 2017-18. Howard, the two-time CHA scoring champion and Player of the Year, extended her career-high goal total to 24 and her point total to 48.

Her revised career marks of 78 goals and 180 points both remain the second-most of all active collegians.

Templeman capped off a good cycle by the Colonials, and the second-period scoring, with a second-chance goal, the tenth of her All-CHA Rookie Team season, that came with 10:43 expired. The KW Rangers product now has three in as many games.

Sadowy's fifth goal of the year, a power play tally that gave Sarah Quaranta and defender/co-captain Katherine Murphy their second assists of the day in the game's final 22 seconds, provided the margin of victory.

"This is the time of year when we want to be thorough, and we want to be playing 60 minutes," Colontino said. "Today, we left nothing to chance, we stuck strong with our systems and we still went after pucks."

Meanwhile, reigning CHA Goaltender of the Week/Month and first team all-conference member Elijah Milne-Price earned her CHA-best 20th win by making 17 saves.

Another win in Saturday's 4:00 p.m. CHA Tournament Final, in which Robert Morris meets Mercyhurst, would give her a share of the program's single-season record, aside from giving the program two straight tournament championships and three under Colontino.

Once again, CHA Tournament games can be seen live on the pay-per-view CHA Digital Network and heard on 970 ESPN Pittsburgh (online only).

"You look back, in this rink, at some of the memories you made here last year, and you want that feeling so badly again," Marcuzzi remarked. "Everyone worked really hard, and we got good efforts from just about everyone. We came out knowing what we had to do, we did it and, hopefully, we can do the same tomorrow."

"At the beginning of the season, we set our goals, and one of them was a regular-season championship, which we did, obviously. But our second goal was to win CHA's, and that's the one that's in front of us right now," Gazzola said. "We're all focused on that, and the next game is the most important one."

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