An 18-year wait to bring a state girls soccer championship back to Westhill has ended – even if it wasn’t the outright title the Warriors wanted so much.
Westhill had to settle for a share of the state Class B title with Section V’s Rochester Aquinas following a tense, back-and-forth title game Sunday at Cortland High School that, after 80 minutes of regulation and 30 minutes of overtime, ended 2-2.
For senior captain Hannah Dorfman, who experienced a state finals defeat to Chenango Forks 12 months ago, getting a piece of the title was far better than getting defeated.
“Being co-champs is a lot to be proud of,” said Dorfman.
Fellow senior Katelyn Karleski echoed those sentiments, saying that going through an entire season undefeated (22-0-2) was a big enough accomplishment, especially with the way the title game unfolded late.
For the wild chain of events in the last two minutes of regulation topped anything that happened in the first 78. Tied at 1-1, Aquinas got a free kick from 25 yards out on the left side. Emily Cook took the shot right at Westhill goalie Bella Lavigne, who saw the ball slip out of her hands and past her.
But the Warriors still had time to answer and, with less than 30 seconds left, put up an all-out attack that paid off when Sophia Caron, fast turning into a post-season legend, sent a hard shot past Irish goalie Lea Annechino inside the right post that sent the game into overtime.
Dorfman made the big play in the first mandatory 10-minute OT period, stopping by herself a two-on-one Irish fast break off a missed corner kick on the other end. By the second OT, the two sides, each of whom were playing a second game in less than 24 hours, were showing fatigue and generating few real opportunities.
Now in a third five-minute OT where the first goal would win, Westhill nearly did so, with a scramble in the final minute that had Annechino out of position, but Cook, positioned on the goal line, kicked it away.
Lavigne now atoned for her mistake late in regulation during the opening seconds of the fourth and final OT, smothering Alana Piano’s point-blank stop on a charge up the middle. No one else would get as good a chance the rest of the way.
Going into the final, most wondered how a Westhill defense that had only allowed five goals all season would fare against a quick, opportunistic Aquinas attack.
It took less than 90 seconds to offer a temporary answer, as the Irish jumped to a 1-0 lead. Piano took a pass from the right side, beat her defender one-on-one and then fitted a low shot past Warriors goalie Bella Lavigne just inside the left post.
Having not surrendered a goal that early in any game this fall, Westhill answered it well, gradually settling into its own attack and closing off the Irish whenever it had the ball.
In the 23rd minute, Westhill earned a corner kick, and converted it when Erica Gangemi headed in Karleski’s cross. And it controlled the possession for most of the rest of the first half, having a go-ahead goal disallowed in the 29th minute due to a handball before the shot, and it remained 1-1 at the break.
Most of the second half was a stalemate, with sporadic chances but little real danger on either end – at least until those last two minutes, when the Warriors endured the extremes of disappointment and elation before a prolonged extra session settled nothing.
The irony of Westhill seeking a fifth state public high-school championship to go with the four it earned in the late 1990s was that, in this state final four, it would need to go through two private-school opponents to win it all.
In the first of these assignments, Westhill met Section I champion Albertus Magnus in Saturday’s state semifinal, relying on its defense and an unlikely source of post-season heroics to defeat the Falcons 1-0.
Though Magnus controlled the game’s early flow, by the middle of the first half the Warriors were beginning to assert control, as shown when Erica Gangemi put a shot off the post in the 19th minute, the closest call for either side as it went to intermission still 0-0.
A Westhill defense that already had 20 shutouts on its ledger would shine again. Against the top Falcons forward, Danielle LaRochelle, Dorfman, Sam VanBuren, Reilly Geer and Alyssa Holstein took turns marking or double-teaming her whenever she had possession.
Meanwhile, the Warriors’ attack probed and waited for a breakthrough. It came in the 57th minute when Caron, taking a pass from Gangemi on the left side, hit a sliding shot past Magnus goalie Mary Amonica. It was Caron’s seventh goal of the post-season.
The Falcons did put on some late-game pressure, with LaRochelle sending a close-up shot over the net as time wound down.
But Westhill held on, and a day later would endure all sorts of theatrics to bring a state title home.
