CENTRAL NEW YORK – A trio of Section III soccer semifinal games Wednesday night would see two local sides make it through to their respective championship games and one, a top seed and defending champion, get ousted.
At Christian Brothers Academy’s Alibrandi Stadium, the Fayetteville-Manlius boys saw its season end with a single boot in a 1-0, double-overtime defeat to Cicero-North Syracuse.
For more than 90 tense minutes, the two long-time league rivals engaged one another, neither side getting a goal as the defenses continually made key stops.
Then, early in the second OT period, with penalty kicks looming, C-NS earned a free kick just inside F-M’s end of the field, but still more than 50 yards from the Hornets’ net.
As he had done many times before, senior goalkeeper Wyatt Dupell ran up to take the free kick. His low, hard drive went straight to F-M goalie Jake Lavelle, and eluded his grasp before finding the top of the net.
That it even got that far largely had to do with C-NS’s defense, which had struggled plenty with F-M the last time they had played, a 4-1 Hornets win in early October.
Knowing that it had to stop Hornets forward Joe Donnelly, who led the league with 21 goals and 11 assists, C-NS had Zack Scott and Aaron Huksic take turns in the middle of the field marking and trailing him throughout the game, which proved successful.
Outside, it was Jacob Dietter and Adam Bonnier covering F-M’s other front-line players and shutting them down, too. Still, the Hornets took nine shots, all of which Dupell stopped.
Contrasting this was the way Manlius Pebble Hill made it to the sectional Class D final, as a lower seed upending a higher seed by that exact same 1-0 margin.
In this case, it was the Trojans defeating no. 3 seed Mater Dei Academy, a 14-2-2 team it had lost to twice in the regular season by a combined 13-4 margin.
But MPH’s main goalie, Will Markwood, had not played in either of those games. He did here, and thwarted Mater Dei’s chances throughout the night, helped in no small part by a back line anchored by Jeff Piscarino and Ayden Whitted in the middle, with sophomore Brody Cook and eighth-grader Andy Lurvey on the wings.
The only goal came in the 25th minute when John Dalisto took a pass from Ayman El-Hindi and, with a particularly good strike, it into the net, a goal that held up the rest of the way.
Now, in next Tuesday’s sectional final at Vernon-Verona-Sherrill, MPH will try and avenge its late-September defeat to Fabius-Pompey, who toppled top seed Poland 3-1 in the other semifinal.
Meanwhile, at Chittenango, the Fayetteville-Manlius girls team will seek a third consecutive sectional Class AA title against top seed West Genesee after the Hornets topped no. 2 seed C-NS 2-1 in the semifinal at Bragman Stadium.
Wasting no time, F-M took advantage of a Northstars foul inside the 18-yard box in the opening minutes as Morgan Goodman converted the penalty kicks.
Minutes later, it was 2-0, Goodman scoring again, and though more than 70 minutes remained in the contest, the Hornets had already notched the winning goals.
Throughout the first half and most of the second half, F-M’s defense put up an effective wall, not letting the Northstars attack inside or outside.
All of that changed when, with 14:51left, McKenzie Slate got around Mackenzie Murphy and passed to Maya Germain, who converted to cut the Hornets’ margin to one.
Energized by this, C-NS attacked hard the rest of the way, forcing free kicks and corner kicks. Every time, though, F-M turned them back, Murphy working her total to eight saves.
