In pursuit of another state Class C championship, the Cazenovia boys lacrosse team had another tough encounter with Penn Yan – and got another victory.
The Lakers defeated the Section V champion Mustangs 9-5 in Wednesday afternoon’s state semifinal at St. John Fisher College in suburban Rochester, never trailing and relying on timely goals and a stifling zone defense to move forward.
P.J. Brown, who paced the Cazenovia attack with three goals, gave full credit to his back line.
“Our defense has really stepped up,” he said.
Lakers head coach Jim Longo said that, when his team’s zone is bothering the opposition the way it did against Penn Yan, “we do it reallly well, and it’s tough to go against.”
It was the third consecutive year that Cazenovia and Penn Yan were meeting in the state semifinals. The Lakers had won each of the previous two meetings, the 2013 and ’14 semifinals both close affairs where Cazenovia held off the Mustangs by 8-7 and 8-6 margins.
Both of those games saw Penn Yan control the game’s tempo and not let the more potent Lakers play at a quicker pace, and it happened here, too.
P.J. Brown put Cazenovia on the board 1:56 into the game, and Jake Stowell converted less than three minutes later. Yet that was all the Lakers could manage in the first quarter, Penn Yan making several defensive stops and breaking through with Craig Gebhardt’s goal in the last minute of the period.
Determined to break out, the Lakers saw Stowell and Brown score less than a minute apart early in the second period, extending the lead to 4-1, before a wild sequence ended up benefiting both sides.
Mustangs goalie Gage Ponsetti took a solo run up the middle, went unguarded, and didn’t stop until he had fired a shot past Cazenovia netminder Brendan Whalen.
Fired up by that rare feat, Penn Yan won the face-off and Sean Emerson scored, cutting Cazenovia’s lead to 4-3, but Peter Burr took the ensuing face-off, ran down the field and hit on his own goal.
Those three goals, from Ponsetti’s feat to Burr’s answer, came 18 seconds apart. But since Burr was able to score at the end of it, Cazenovia stayed out in front, and a goal from Jake Lewis in the last minute of the half allowed the Lakers to go to the break with a 6-3 edge.
In the last seconds of the half, a pair of Cazenovia penalties put Penn Yan two men up to open the third quarter, but again the Lakers’ defense held firm, Whalen making a pair of point-blank stops.
Between that, and the turnovers that T.J. Connellan, Eli Mitchell, Jake Shaffner, Adam Race and other members of the back line forced, the Lakers kept the Mustangs off the board for more than 14 minutes before Tate Stewart found the net – which Cole Willard answered less than two minutes later.
So it went to the fourth quarter with Cazenovia up 7-4. The Mustangs again cut the margin to two when Emerson scored with 9:22 left, but the Lakers’ defense continued to force Penn Yan turnovers when it tried to inch closer.
“The zone frustrated them,” said Mitchell. “We rode well, too, and did great on the ground balls.”
In the final minutes, Cazenovia didn’t sit on its lead. Brown hit on his third goal with 4:28 to play, and when Jake Lewis, fed by Burr, found the net with 1:55 left, the Lakers could exhale – and look ahead to a chance at a third state title in five years.
To get it, Cazenovia will need to beat Cold Spring Harbor (Section VIII) in Saturday’s state title game at 11 a.m. at Vestal High School, near Binghamton. The Seahawks defeated Pleasantville 14-4 in the other state semifinal Wednesday at Middletown High School.
Longo said his players still remember the pain of losing the state final to Bronxville a year ago, and know that Cold Spring Harbor will provide a similar examination.
“We’ll get severely tested,” said Longo.
