Phoebe Staenz and Yale just disassembled RPI

There are some brutal and devastating monsters in this terrifying world.

Sometimes your destruction comes in the form of a fifty-foot anthropomorphic marshmallow. Sometimes, a one-ton shark launches itself out of the ocean to pluck you out of the seas. And sometimes your doom comes in the form of a 5’4” Swiss who surgically and systematically takes you apart.

For RPI on Friday, it was the latter, as Phoebe Staenz dropped a hat trick along with two assists on the overmatched Red Hawks in route to a 7-2 victory. The Engineers kept it close for a while, trailing 4-2 at the end of the second, before Staenz cut them apart with two goals in the third to put it out of reach.

A Swiss national team player who won bronze with the Eisgenossen in Sochi (scoring a goal in the medal game), Staenz was USCHO.com Rookie of the Year as a freshman but had seen her points drop from 26 to 24 to 17 last season. After Friday’s monstrous showing she now is nearly halfway towards her 2015-16 points total just five games into the new campaign.

Against the Engineers, Staenz looked back on her Olympic form, finding holes in the Engineers defense and looking all the the world like a sharp-eyed steely hawk, bracing her own first score with a pair of assists to Krista Yip-Chuck and Eden Murray before plucking a couple of opportunistic goals from RPI to put the game away. Yale will certainly need her on form this season, with five of the top 10 teams through Friday’s play hailing from the ECAC.

I, for one, welcome the rule of our diminutive Swiss overlords.