Dan Falloon
Silver wasn’t sweet for the Muskie soccer teams in Dryden yesterday.
Both squads ended their seasons as NorWOSSA runners-up, although each one took a different path to get there.
But the end result—a 3-2 loss on penalty kicks to Dryden for the boys and a 4-1 defeat to Kenora for the girls—dashed NorWOSSA repeat bids for both teams.
The boys, by virtue of having the top regular-season record at 4-1-1, earned the bye to the league final, leaving Dryden and Kenora to battle it out in the semi-final.
Dryden advanced with a 4-2 win—setting up a showdown with Fort High.
The black-and-gold jumped out to a 2-0 first-half lead on a pair of goals by Colton Spicer.
But the Eagles struck back with the wind in the second half, taking advantage of a blocked clearing attempt by keeper Matt DePiero before knotting the game on a scramble where DePiero was knocked down.
The Muskies had several chances to retake the lead as regulation time dwindled as a trio of shots whizzed past the Dryden goal’s outer boundaries.
A pair of 10-minute overtime periods solved nothing, although the Eagles had the best chance for a “golden goal” when a shot grazed the right post late in the second extra frame.
With the game going to penalty kicks, DePiero was switched out in favour of one-time Muskie goalie Jameson Shortreed, who played out this season after two years guarding the cage.
Both teams scored on their first two shots and were stopped on their third attempts.
The fourth shooters each snuck in their shots, so everything came down to the fifth and final attackers.
After Fort High’s attempt sailed over the crossbar, Dryden’s shooter made no mistake in burying a shot to the top right corner to send the Eagles to the all-Ontarios in Windsor next week.
Muskie coach Shane Beckett admitted that while the loss was a disappointment, his team had followed the game plan and simply was on the wrong end of a game that could have gone either way.
The girls’ team, meanwhile, earned a surprise berth in the final after shocking Dryden 1-0—their first win in NorWOSSA play this season—in the semi-final earlier in the day.
Annika McTavish scored the lone goal to pit Fort High against top-seeded Kenora with a trip to OFSAA on the line.
In the end, though, the Broncos were just too strong for the Muskies, tallying twice in each half before Danielle Jean was able to poke a shot into the Kenora goal to round out the scoring.
Muskie coach Sarah Noonan said she wasn’t overly disappointed with the loss, acknowledging that while a trip to OFSAA next week in Sarnia was the team’s goal from the beginning of the season, the team played well over the course of the day and was defeated by a superior Kenora team.
