CAMDEN – Typically when a team is pursuing a championship claiming that title is the big moment, and Cicero-North Syracuse field hockey will agree if it takes the Section III Class A crown back from last year’s winner, Rome Free Academy.
Yet it’s difficult to ignore how the Northstars even got to Friday’s title game at Camden High School, even if the ending – a 1-0 defeat to the Black Knights – proved too painfully familiar.
For more than two hours Sunday afternoon on that same Camden turf, C-NS and archrival Liverpool went at it in the sectional Class A semifinals.
Regulation time didn’t settle it. Nor did a pair of tense seven-on-seven overtime periods. Only in a shootout did the Northstars finally subdue the Warriors and earn its shot at the title.
These teams had met twice in the regular season and split those games, nearly assuring that things would be close again when the two reunited right after RFA pounded Fayetteville-Manlius 9-0 in the first semifinal.
For the most part, the defenses stayed in control. All that C-NS could manage was a goal by Addie Esce, and Liverpool was limited to Gianna Carbone’s tally.
Yet the game was mostly played in the Warriors’ end, with the Northstars getting a wave of scoring opportunities yet mostly getting turned back, Jenna Hayes amassing 10 saves in goal for Liverpool.
Overtime’s seven-on-seven format usually means a quick goal, which happened in two sectional semifinals the day before (Canastota over Mount Markham in Class C, Weedsport over Morrisville-Eaton in Class D), but not here.
So it came down to penalty strokes, where players run from midfield toward the net and get one chance to shoot it past the goalie. Three times C-NS beat Hayes, while none of Liverpool’s attempts got past Northstars goalie Olivia Planty.
Now, though, it was time for RFA, a team C-NS lost to not just in the sectional final of 2023, but 5-1 when the two sides had met early in October.
Learning well from that meeting, the Northstars beefed up its defense and would contain the Black Knights in a manner no other Section III team had done this fall.
Constantly on the attack, RFA earned five penalty corners throughout the first half, yet could not convert on any of them, denied by the back line and by five total saves from Planty.
They went to the third quarter and the Black Knights were turned back two more times on penalty corners. Finally, on the eighth try Izzy McMahon’s pass found Fiona McMahon, who fired a shot past Benson to put RFA in front.
This was the exact same combination, one McMahon sister finding another, which produced the only goal of the 2023 sectional final, and now C-NS had to try and answer it.
Throughout the rest of the third and the entire final period, the Northstars did all that it could to break RFA’s pressure, yet could not do so, only earning one penalty corner in the closing stretch and not converting it.
