Six years removed from its last Section III Class A championship, the East Syracuse Minoa boys soccer team had a glorious opportunity to end that drought.
All the no. 2 seed Spartans had to do was knock off no. 4 seed Watertown in last Saturday’s sectional final, played right down the road on the turf at Fayetteville-Manlius.
But in a tense thriller that spilled into double overtime, ESM lost, 2-1, when the Cyclones’ Brian Netto scored his second goal of the night. It marked Watertown’s first-ever sectional title, and third straight 2-1 game the Spartans had played in the post-season.
First, there was the tense 2-1 quarterfinal win at home over Jamesville-DeWitt on Oct. 19. Then ESM had to knock off no. 6 seed and defending champion New Hartford in last Wednesday’s sectional semifinal at Cicero-North Syracuse’s Bragman Stadium.
Unlike with J-D, ESM fell behind New Hartford, but a fair amount of resilience, combined with the singular skills of Kyle Scalzo, produced another 2-1 playoff victory in this clash of Spartan sides.
For a while, the game had the feel of one of those soccer quirks where one team controlled most of the possession, yet the other pulled it out through stellar defense and work in goal.
New Hartford, despite having the ball in its own end most of the first half, led 1-0 at intermission and were seeing its pair of netminders, Nick Buchholz and Mike Nassif, combine for 15 saves.
Yet ESM stayed patient, and when it was needed, Kyle Scalzo delivered his magic.
It was Scalzo converting near the midway point of the second half off a feed from Safet Suljic to tie it up, 1-1. Then, with five minutes left in regulation, Ty Mulcahy’s pass found its way to Scalzo, who put home his 24th goal of the season.
That proved enough, and while ESM was hanging on, the bracket was turning in its favor because top-seeded Fulton, who had beaten the Spartans two weeks earlier, lost, 1-0, to Watertown in the other semifinal.
Now the Cyclones would meet the Spartans, and given the way the entire post-season had gone, it only figured that the sectional final would require more than 80 minutes of regulation and get decided by a one-goal margin.
Though it had to work into the wind in the first half, ESM kept Watertown in a defensive crouch throughout the early stages, requiring some good stops from Cyclones goalie Caleb Kolb to keep things scoreless.
Eventually, Watertown did get some chances of its own, but ESM turned them back, and it remained 0-0 going to the second half, where things really picked up.
Seven minutes into the half, the Cyclones had a throw-in near the net. Ethan Baytos flung it to the far post, where Netto controlled it and, in one flash, sent it past Ryan Cacace to give Watertown a 1-0 lead.
ESM rallied just as it did against New Hartford, tying it 1-1 six minutes later on a free kick where Scalzo sent the ball to the net and, with perfect timing, Mulcahy flicked it past Kolb.
For the rest of regulation, the Spartans possessed and probed, but Watertown kept making key stops, sending it to OT, where in the first 15-minute period ESM continued to look for the game-winner and could not convert.
Early in the second OT, the Cyclones counter-attacked and forced a corner kick. They played it short, with Baytos passing it to Netto, lined up at an angle where he could take a hard shot over Cacace’s reach inside the top right corner of the net to end it.
Watertown advanced to face Queensbury (Section II) in the regional portion of the state tournament, while ESM finished with a 15-4 record.
Back on Thursday, Manlius-Pebble Hill saw its Section III Class D championship dreams get dashed in the semifinal round as the Trojans took a 1-0 loss to no. 2 seed Lyme in the sectional semifinals.
Going in, MPH knew that containing Lyme’s Slater Bushen, who had netted 50 goals during the season, was important, yet Bushen still managed to put one past Stew Falso in the first half.
The Trojans shut down Lyme the rest of the way and had all kinds of opportunities to pull even, yet could not do so as Indians goalie Brandon Sprague stopped all 10 shots he faced. Falso finished with 12 saves.
