Many times a scenario similar to this has played through my head. Every athletes dream is to be able to have a stellar performance against their rivals. The fact that I attended this school for three years through middle school made this day even more important.
The game had begun this Saturday morning of April. It was a lacrosse game between to teams with a ton of hate between them, Frederick and Thomas Johnson. As expected it was a physical game filled with gut wrenching hits and heart stopping goals. But come the fourth quarter T.J. had begun to pull away from Frederick, the team that I was playing for.
Previous to the start of the fourth quarter I had scored three times, twice on a drive around the goal, the other on a feed to the crease on a fast break. My senior season was coming down to this game as I had hoped to not lose to T.J. in this sport while I was on the varsity team.
The game had taken a quick break as is expected between each quarter of play. One of our players, the captain, was getting extremely emotional as he tried to fire up the team to come back from this deficit. He began jumping around screaming out, “Let’s go! Let’s show them what this team is made of!” It sent a quick jolt through the team as everyone began to get pumped and ready for this fourth and final quarter of play.
Starting from the face-off we came out full-steam ahead throwing check after check, hit after hit, the team gave all that we had in order to be in a position to win the game. A few minutes into the quarter TJ committed a penalty requiring them to be man-down for one minute of play. Immediately we took advantage of this as I scored within seconds of the penalty being called. Later on in the quarter a similar scenario played out and we were able to narrow their lead to one goal.
This seemed to be a wake up call to them as they immediately took the ball to their offensive half and held it their for what seemed like an eternity. The clock continued to tic past the 2-minute mark and I began to feel that we had lost all hope. That quickly changed as our captain was able to jar the ball loose and draw a slashing penalty, once again giving us a perfect opportunity to tie the game with only about a minute left.
The game restarted, as the penalized player entered the box, and we began to pass the ball around searching for an opportunity to score.
My fellow attack men, Andy, and I had a play that we ran to success nearly every man up situation. I would receive the ball at my position behind the goal and take it around to the right, the side that he was on. As soon as the defender would leave him and come to me I pass the ball to him and nearly every time he was able to squeeze the ball into the top corner for a goal. The problem was this time the defender realized what we were doing and knocked my pass down and it rolled on the ground passed Andy. He was able to pick the ball back up and pass it around again. The ball made its way back to me with about thirty seconds left and not a plan to go to. Andy signaled to run the same play we had just run and I questioned his decision, but went with it anyways as he was a smart player.
Running around the crease I waited for the defender to leave Andy and come after me but he never did, he stayed out on the wing defending a man who was not in position to score. I continued around the crease, in front of the goal, and shot it right between the legs of the goalie. That was it, I had done it. I made a play that every athlete dreams of forcing overtime on a last second goal to break the hearts of the TJ players.
We would go on to win in overtime nearly seconds after the face-off as Andy took it from the wing and scored. The celebration had begun and we could rightfully say that we never lost to TJ while on the varsity lacrosse team, a feeling that was great to have as we were never able to defeat them while I was on the football team.