SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – Everett Crowe took his chance, and it paid off in a big way.
With Saturday’s Western Massachusetts Class Championship Game winding down toward a possible penalty kick shootout, the Mount Greylock junior decided to take a shot at the goal rather than make the extra pass.
And the resulting goal gave the Mounties a 3-2 win over Pathfinder and a regional title.
“Kofi [Roberts] played a great ball to me out on the wing,” Crowe said. “I saw my space, took it. … I looked in the box, and there was no one there particularly open. Usually, I play it across.
“But I was like, ‘To hell with it.’ It’s [tied], we’re like five minutes left.”
Crowe’s shot slipped through a Pathfinder defender and past the keeper before carroming off the far post and into the net to set off a wild celebration on Springfield Central’s Berte Field.
The Mounties gave up a 2-0 lead in the second half but righted the ship to win their third in a row and fourth in six games heading into Wednesday’s Division 5 State Tournament opener.
“It’s huge,” Crowe said as his teammates continued the celebration around him and the Mount Greylock girls got ready for their Western Mass final, another double OT Mounties win. “There’s a banner in our gymnasium with all they years where we’ve won [a Western Mass title], and up until last year, we hadn’t won this century.
“It’s huge to go back to that.”
Mount Greylock dominated for much of the game, compiling a 17-4 advantage in shots on goal, not to mention numerous Mountie chances that went just wide or high of frame.
They cashed in on one of those chances early.
Everett Bayliss sent a ball forward for Roberts at the top of the 18. Roberts got tangled up with a Pathfinder defender but deflected the ball to his left where Simon Shin knocked a one-touch shot from about eight yards past a drawn-out keeper to make it 1-0 in the 12th minute of the game.
Despite strong pressure from Mount Greylock, that is where things stood for the rest of the first half.
Pathfinder did finally generate a shot on goal with a direct kick from about 35 yards in the 36th minute that Mount Greylock keeper Ward Bianchi (two saves) caught to preserve the lead.
His offense rewarded him by doubling that lead early in the second half.
Bayliss set up Will Igoe for a blast that found the back of the net to make it 2-0 in the 46th minute of play.
With an 8-1 advantage in shots on goal and all of the momentum seemingly on its side, Mount Greylock looked poised to run away with its third shutout of the state tournament.
But a Pathfinder team that scored 11 goals in its two Western Mass tournament wins had other ideas.
Seven minutes after Igoe’s goal, Pioneers forward Adonis Dupre took a cross from the right wing and finished to get his team on the board.
Three minutes after that, Evan Costa crashed the net on a Justin Davis free kick and played a rebound off Bianchi into the net to level the score, 2-2, with 24 minutes, 56 seconds left to play.
After the letdown, Mount Greylock regained control of play, the Pathfinder’s defense stiffened up for the next 42 minutes.
“I called timeout after the first [Pathfinder] goal, because we were getting very sloppy,” Mount Greylock coach Mike Russo said. “We were giving the ball away in the midfield too much, not winning one-on-ones. We let them take over the game.
“We made a couple of substitutions. We pushed Kofi [Roberts] in the middle with Everett Bayliss and had Simon [Shin] play out wide. We were trying to play our four front players against their four backs, and I think that helped a bit, because they didn’t have any cover. They were matched up man-for-man.”
Mount Greylock had some chances to get the go-ahead goal in regulation. Bayliss was just wide on a header off a Luca Mellow-Bartels cross in the 60th minute. Igoe had a shot on goal off a corner kick from Shin with about two minutes to go before overtime.
And in the first OT, Roberts took a touch pass from Igoe on a direct free kick from 20 yards and fired a shot on goal that forced Pathfinder’s keeper to make a diving save.
Finally, all that pressure paid off, and Mount Greylock got to celebrate its second banner win of the 21st century.
“I’ve been coaching for about 50 years, and I still get emotional,” said Russo, a longtime collegiate men’s coach at Williams College.
“[Pathfinder], I thought, ran out of steam a little bit in the overtimes, because they were hitting long balls, and their forwards weren’t running them down. So I thought we had the edge on corners. They dropped all 11 players back. It was just a question of when it was going to happen. We were fortunate it happened when it did.”
