By Mike Zummo
You’d be hard pressed to play better soccer than the Pine Bush Bushmen did in the Section 9 Class AA tournament last week.
The Bushmen took the two-time defending Section 9 Class AA boys’ soccer champions, the Monroe-Woodbury Crusaders to the limit, battling them to a 3-3 tie after 110 minutes. However, the Crusaders’ beat the Bushmen in penalty kicks to claim their third straight championship, leaving a devastated Bushmen team left to watch the celebration.
“That was a heck of a game,” Pine Bush coach Marc Gittleman said. “It was fun to coach, a heartbreaking result, but just overall it was a good night of soccer.”
Pine Bush had to tie the game twice late in the second half just to get the game to overtime.
The Bushmen were trailing the Crusaders 2-1 late in the second half when Michael Dempsey sent a pass forward to Louie Gonzalez, who lofted a shot over the head of Monroe-Woodbury goalie Joe Badalamente to tie the game with 9:10 to go.
The Crusaders’ responded less than four minutes later when Pine Bush goalie Jack Bisaillon couldn’t beat Monroe-Woodbury’s Trevor Lagarde to the ball, and he redirected into the net to give the Crusaders’ the lead again.
“If Jack isn’t in goal, we might not be where we were, period,” Gittleman said. “That style of play has served us well and it wasn’t the time to change that. He is a rock back there. He makes plays that make you think ‘how the heck did that happen?’ Sometimes that comes with risk involved and we’re OK with that.”
But the Bushmen weren’t finished as Dempsey connected for his second goal of the game to tie the game at 3-3 with 2:21 left to go and sending the Bushmen to overtime for the second time in as many days.
They beat Newburgh, 4-3, in overtime on April 19, to advance.
“It’s nearly 200 minutes at that point,” Gittleman said. “I felt like in the first 60 minutes of the game, we were deflated and couldn’t find our legs. Then, for whatever reason, after the second mask break, it was kind of like ‘put up or shut up’ time. They dug deep and they found something. It felt like we played better in the last 20 minutes and two overtimes than we did in the first half.”
Neither team was able to score in either overtime and the game went to penalty kicks, where the Crusaders’ jumped out to an early lead when Legarde connected on his kick and then Badalamente blocked Pine Bush’s Jacob Rosenfeld’s shot.
The teams traded shots until Monroe-Woodbury’s final kicker, Ethan Meyers connected making the Bushmen’s final shot meaningless as the Crusaders celebrated and the Bushmen collapsed in defeat.
Even so, it doesn’t overshadow the Fall 2 season the Bushmen had, entering the tournament as the fourth seed and knocking off the top seed before taking the two-time sectional champions to the limit.
“They’re going to leave with immediate heartbreak and look back on it a week from now and two weeks from now or two years from now with the utmost satisfaction and beaming with pride from our heart knowing they made Pine Bush proud, to make those kids proud, and to make me proud says a lot about them. I couldn’t be happier.”
The Bushmen played strong for most of the season, which began on March 19 and they didn’t have a home game until April 5. They finished with an 8-3-3 record, as the sectional final goes in the books as a tie.
They saved their best soccer for the last two games.
“I couldn’t ask for a better group of young men,” Gittleman said. “They’ve been in the program longer than I have, and to see them flourish from where they were as sophomores and juniors and to ice it together. There were thoughts of ‘are we even going to have a senior season’ and now we’re playing in the section final.”