ST. PAUL — It’s not often (i.e. never) when coach strolls into a postgame media session, grabs a seat at the raised table and says, “Do you mind if I tell you guys a story?”

Turns out, Tyler Palmiscno was in a storytelling kind of mood on Friday after his Green Wave staged a most improbable rally to beat top-seeded Hibbing/Chisholm 7-5 in a state Class 1A semifinal at the Xcel Energy Center.

Go right ahead coach.

“So, we’re walking out for warmups and … Cole Schmiedeberg breaks his Tuuk (skate blade holder),” Palmiscno said. “Like, it just broke. He can’t go. And it’s a mad scramble trying to figure out, ‘Can we fix it? Buy new skates?’

“We talk all the time about just handling adversity, because you know it’s coming. We didn’t expect it would come before one player hit the ice, but it came. I thought we did a good of handling that, and obviously there was a lot of adversity in the course of 51 minutes and we handled that as well.”

And that was that for Palmiscno’s story, a real cliffhanger. 

Wait, so how did you handle the broken skate?

“I’m not at liberty to tell you,” Palmiscno deadpanned. “So, one of our coaches (Coltyn Sanderson) had the right size, size 8, double-E. He went and got those but (Schmiedeberg) didn’t get an opportunity to warm up. And then one of the staff here with the state high school league brought the skate to a shoe repair shop and got it re-riveted. And (Schmiedeberg) had his own skates by the start of the second period.

“Honestly, it couldn’t have worked out better.”

Palmiscno’s story was an apt one, considering his underdog Green Wave had just rallied from a 5-2 deficit late in the second period with a flurry of goals — four in a span of 2:44 and five straight in all. That couldn’t have worked out better, either.

Adversity hit Anoka in much the same manner at the 2003 state tournament. Derek Johnson, a senior and top defenseman for the Tornados, was about to put on his skates for warmups when he noticed the steel in one of his blades was cracked. Junior defenseman Joe Ganser wore the same size skates, offered them up to his elder teammate and then watched the game from the bench in almost-full gear.

“Watch the replay of the celebration,” Sean Fish, a senior co-captain that season, said in the book Tourney Time. “All of a sudden you will see a kid running out in his Doc Martens because he doesn’t have his skates.”

Anoka won that state Class 2A semifinal game 2-1 over Holy Angels, then beat Roseville 3-1 in the title game.

Couldn’t have worked out better.