Somewhere in the middle of the last decade, things went awry for the Liverpool boys soccer team, and it wasn’t because the Warriors stopped winning games – it’s just that those wins stopped taking place in late October or early November, when they count the most.
For 12 long years, Liverpool had to watch as other schools, especially Baldwinsville, Fayetteville-Manlius and Cicero-North Syracuse, took their turns advancing to the Section III Class AA finals and winning them, the Warriors wondering when, or if, it would ever get its turn again.
At last, that day arrived when Liverpool toppled Baldwinsville 1-0 Wednesday night in the sectional AA semifinal at Fulton, again relying on its defense to do most of the hard work especially after Aleksander Dzodic’s first-half goal that the Bees were unable to answer.
They had met twice in the regular season, and B’ville had won on both occasions, each of them shutouts – by a 1-0 margin on Aug. 31 at LHS Stadium on a Brandon Mimas goal less than 90 seconds into the game, and by a more lopsided 4-0 margin at Pelcher-Arcaro Stadium a few weeks later.
So the Warriors had both short-term and long-term unpleasant history to overcome, and the only way to do so was with the same kind of tough resistance that had marked the team throughout this particular season.
Dzodic was just one small part of a terrific back line that, with the likes of Caleb Munski, Owen Valentine and Amko Sihalovic on hand, kept B’ville from the early goals that had hurt so much in the first two meetings – and anything else for that matter, with goalie Ben Bowers only having to make four saves.
So it only figured that defenders were involved in the game’s lone scoring play in the first half. Valentine had the ball and, finding what he wanted, passed it to Dzodic, whose shot eluded the reach of B’ville goalie D.J. Moore and found the net.
For the rest of the half, and all through the 40 minutes of the second half, B’ville did everything possible to respond, yet were denied on each occasion, the Warriors finally getting the big post-season win that had eluded them for more than a decade.
In one more ironic twist, the Warriors play its sectional final against top seed Fayetteville-Manlius at B’ville’s Pelcher-Arcaro Stadium Tuesday night, and it was just the match-up the Hornets didn’t want since Liverpool played them to a 0-0 draw at Swan Pond in September and beat them 1-0 in the last week of the regular season at LHS Stadium.
