FULTON – Raucous celebrations in one corner of the field, players slumped and in tears on the other side.
Championship games can evoke high emotions, and Monday night’s Section III Class AA boys soccer championship game at Fulton was no different as East Syracuse Minoa experienced the pain of defeat and Nottingham the joy of winning a title for the first time since 1987.
The 3-1 decision helped further define a season for the Spartans where it was sensational against almost everyone else it played, yet could not beat the Bulldogs on three separate occasions.
Both of the first two meetings were close and exciting contests, but Nottingham pulled them out 4-3 and 1-0. Both times ESM felt like it played well enough to win and just could not close it out.
And for a long while the sectional final followed that exact same pattern. Put to the early test, Spartans defenders Nate Carr, Josh Glanton, Rob Sweeney and Ahmed Mujezinovic passed it and goalkeeper Robbie Gabor made a series of strong stops.
Meanwhile, ESM applied plenty of its own pressure on the other end, drawing set pieces and long throw-ins from Jackson Tedesco, yet they were all turned back by a tight-fitting Bulldogs back line which often won the battles for the 50-50 balls.
In the 29th minute, Nottingham went in front on a tremendous long pass from Mao Nkuruzinza that found Bilengana Ebuela up the middle and Ebuela, beating his defender one-on-one, then slid a low shot by Gabor.
Unfazed by this, the Spartans applied pressure and appeared to grab all the momentum when, with just 0.2 seconds left in the half, Joel Alvarez took the rebound of his own corner kick and fitted a perfect left-footed shot from a tough angle inside the top left corner of the net.
Energized, ESM controlled the flow of play early in the second half but, again, Nottingham resisted well, gradually beginning to build up its own attack and find space to run and get around defenders.
With 18:58 to play, a Bulldogs corner kick got rebounded to Azizi Juma, who put in the go-ahead goal. ESM would only have a handful of chances down the stretch, including an Alvarez shot that flared wide, before Nottingham put it away with 1:07 left on Mairo Kovo’s goal.
The Bulldogs will take a perfect 19-0 record into the state Class AA tournament regional final this Saturday against Section II’s Bethlehem while the Spartans finished at 15-4 overall.
