LOWELL - When she stepped back to take the corner kick with lord knows how much time remaining in the last game (since the clock at Cawley Stadium was out), Newburyport sophomore Veronica Poirier was heated. In this case, that was a good thing since her coach, Robb Gonnam, moved her to the front to put a spark in the Clippers.
Not long after rallying with about six minutes to play to tie the MIAA Division 3 girls' soccer championship game at 2, it looked like the throw-in by Clippers senior Colleen Coviello was perfect. It got Bromfield goalie Lindsey Burke off balance, and it enabled the Clippers to poke in the go-ahead goal on the rebound.
All referee Charlie Pacheco could think while he frantically waved his flag was, "Please don't let it go in."
It did. And Pacheco had to explain to Poirier and the rest of the Clippers that their comeback was still incomplete.
"It was an easy call," Pacheco said, well after a goal by Newburyport's Taylor Bresnahan off a Poirier corner gave the Clippers a 3-2 win and the state title, while making his call irrelevant. "It's just that nobody could hear it."
Playing on the all-purpose turf, Coviello was so caught in the moment that she made the throw from the white line that marked the football sideline instead of the yellow line for the soccer field.
"I was too into the game," she said. "I had no idea."
All she knew was the goal she thought was the winner wasn't, and that Newburyport didn't have a lot of time to get another one before the end of regulation.
"We were all just so frustrated by that and basically it was so fast because all of us wanted it so bad," Coviello said. "We got the cross and no matter what, everybody was doing everything they could to get the ball into the net because we knew our time was running out."
About seven minutes after a gorgeous goal off a free kick by junior midfielder Laura Muise, Poirier sent a corner screaming into the box where Bresnahan was waiting to head it dead ahead for the rally-capper.
"I just tried to get it off my head," Bresnahan said. "I was so angry and so fired up right then."
After using a newspaper clipping as motivation to get by St. Mary's for the North title, Newburyport used the rally-stalling whistle as motivation.
"When people take things away from us, we don't accept it," Bresnahan said. "We worked so hard to get here."
They had to break through Burke, Bromfield's keeper who had been bulletproof most of the second half, coming up with four saves early and getting help from the crossbar on a couple of Newburyport shots.
"She was saving everything," Gonnam said. "I figured the way we would have to score on her would have to be a deflected shot, a cross, or a corner kick. She read the plays extremely well and positioned her body accordingly."
Gonnam went for broke with his team down a goal after Maddie Darden punched in her second goal with nine minutes to play, as he put seven players up front.
"It was a necessity," he said. "It's either now or we're going to go home on a long bus ride unhappy."
