The game teetered in that fragile space between madness and outright insanity. Then it tipped in the latter direction.
With two minutes left, a frenzy descended on Arthur L. Johnson’s gleaming field. Westfield, trailing by a goal, worked the ball around. Then lost it. Then got it. Then lost it again. Then got it again.
And then, with five seconds left, lost it for the final time. The end. The end of an enthralling Union County Tournament final in which No. 1 seed Summit (7-3, 2-3 NJILL Fitch-Pitt, ranked No. 10) defeated No. 2 seed Westfield (7-4, 4-2 NJILL Fitch-Pitt, ranked No. 8), 10-9, escaping a gripping Blue Devil comeback. Barely.
“I wish there was another two minutes,” defenseman Trey Brown said. “Stuff could have happened.”
But stuff did happen. Lots of stuff. Two more whole minutes of stuff might simply have overloaded the scrambled brains of the fans who witnessed Saturday night’s epic.
“It was a heck of a game,” said Jim Davidson, Summit’s head coach. He said it again a minute later: “Just a tremendous game today.”
A tremendous game in a history of tremendous games between the two schools. Summit and Westfield have now contested 11 consecutive UCT title games. This was Summit’s fifth straight title. The Hilltoppers also claimed this year’s regular-season meeting, 7-6, back in March.
And it seemed, early in the third quarter, that they might march to a mundane victory. Westfield faced a daunting 9-4 deficit that appeared even more insurmountable because of Summit’s methodical, time-leaching possessions. Time slipped and dropped away, steadily and then, it seemed, with increasing speed.
Then John McDonald scored to make it 9-5. A muted bench reaction. But a trickle of momentum began flowing.
That trickle soon grew into a gentle stream. Ryan Waldman sliced through a couple defenders, arrowed toward the goal. The net bulged momentarily. The momentum became a roaring river.
The game barreled into the fourth quarter. Dylan Wragg ripped a shot. Ball off the crossbar, off the post, bouncing around. A curious moment of waiting. A gasp, a hush.
The referee rushed in to signal a goal. A stampede ensued in the Westfield stands.
A minute later came Cody Lam, turning, twisting, slowing, stopping as if to think about it, then bearing down on the goalie and bouncing in a goal. Delirium descended.
“A hell of a story,” middie Danny McGann said with about six minutes left.
Oh, it was.
It was, indeed.
Summit scored. Westfield answered. That made it 10-9. That was the way it stayed. Somehow.
“Pissed,” said William Wertheimer, Westfield’s head coach.
“Once we started doing what we knew we could do, we made the comeback,” Wertheimer said. “Just a little too late.”
Summit buried Westfield in an early hole, scoring the game’s first 3 goals and exiting the first quarter with a 5-2 lead.
“Slow start,” Brown said. “I felt like we were so energetic and so excited for the first couple minutes of the game that it shot us in the foot because we were focusing just on the bigger picture instead of those micro details that helped create victory.”
Wertheimer was more blunt.
“We came out and made some stupid mistakes, basically gave them goals off turnovers,” he said.
Davidson, the Summit coach, alluded to those turnovers while remaining gracious. “We got the ball in the middle of the field a couple of times,” he said, a more polite way of saying they turned the ball over a bunch.
Armed with the early lead, Summit appeared content to possess the ball, drain the clock and wear down Westfield. A slow style is the Hilltoppers’ trademark—they “sort of lull you to sleep,” Wertheimer said—and that strategy proved effective with the big lead.
Effective, that is, until Danny Hazard started winning nearly every faceoff for Westfield. Hazard ultimately went 15-22 on faceoffs, delivering Westfield possession after possession during that unchecked run of 4 goals.
“Hazard really just did an unbelievable job,” Davidson said. And Waldman, who scored 4 goals and tallied 3 assists, “Was a handful. He’s unbelievable.”
Waldman has grappled all season with an ankle injury but returned in the UCT semifinals against Scotch Plains-Fanwood. He appeared unhampered Saturday as he spun Summit defenders in circles. Lam dazzled, too, scoring 3 goals.
But as Waldman finally shook off his injury, the plague hopped to another Blue Devil. Defenseman Michael Marshall missed the game with a quad injury sustained during the semifinals. Wertheimer said the injury isn’t too serious, and Brown praised Jonathan Boufarah for stepping up to fill Marshall’s hole.
In the end, though, it was Summit’s night. The Hilltopper bench streamed onto the field at the final buzzer and crowded around the trophy. Union County, once again, belonged to Summit.
Westfield will return to action with a showdown against Pingry on Tuesday at 4:30 p.m.
But on Saturday, at the end of it all, there was Sandy Mamary, Westfield’s athletic director, holding a plastic bag of second-place medals and laughing a little and wondering aloud what to do with them. No one wants second-place medals, she rightfully assumed.
So she held them at her side, sort of behind her leg, almost as if to deny their existence.
