Chapter 26: The Playoffs

We entered the conference playoffs as the team favored to win. Our local paper was helping to fuel the interest by featuring pictures and biographies of each of the starters in the week prior to the first game of the playoffs. I got a lot of razzing at school the day after my picture and bio appeared. I was pretty uncomfortable with all this attention, but I was in the minority from my teammates. Most of the rest of the guys on the team were really enjoying their moment in the spotlight.

We waltzed through our first playoff game against the eighth seeded team, winning 5-1. John Pennington's defensive adjustments on the field were solid, and Kevin and I stopped just about every ball that came our way.

Our second round opponent gave us a tougher game, but the result was still a win, this time 3-1. By this time, the big-city newspapers were paying attention too. The Metro Times had us rated in the Top Twenty in the state, a huge boost for us. Their small article about our win in the second round also pointed out what their reporter considered to be a major flaw in our game, however. He wrote that he wasn't sure we had the depth to win against Rockton Heights, the only team to defeat us in the regular season.

Coach Neville made sure he read that article to us during our warm- ups the next afternoon. He posted copies of it on every locker as a reminder of what was expected of us. He wanted us to confound expectations, and he had every confidence that we could.

Since we were seeded first in the tournament, we had the home field advantage. Rockton came to us to play the championship game, and we made sure the stands were packed with fans. We wanted it loud and we got it. The cheerleaders, normally only required to perform at football games in the fall, voluntarily showed up to lead the crowd. They cajoled people to slide over closer to each other so that more people could sit down. They worked the crowd until there were no gaps to be seen at all. Heather O'Toole even went so far as to climb up into the stands and act as a traffic cop, moving people around and filling in spaces. She got a lot of laughter and no small amount of applause for her efforts as she picked her way back down to the sidelines, her golden-red ponytail swishing back and forth.

And it was all very much worthwhile. Rockton Heights came into the game a little overconfident. We capitalized on that, scoring our first goal within the first ten minutes. By the final whistle, we had trounced the toughest competition we could find in our conference, beating them 6-1. I even scored a goal, only my second as a varsity player, and it was very satisfying to get that goal in the conference finals. We were conference champs, the first team from our school to win the title in soccer.

Sectional playoffs didn't start until the next weekend, so we had Saturday and Sunday off from practice. This gave our scouting and coaching staff time to prepare for an unfamiliar opponent. We would enter the sectionals seeded fourth out of eight conference champions. The winner of the sectional tournament would go downstate for the State Tournament, again a single-elimination tournament for the eight winners of sectionals from around the state.

The Monday Metro Times ran a big story about our conference win. The story traced our season from the beginning that had held so much promise, the schools that had been scouting Skip, and our wins up until the accident. Then, the article continued with how our team's makeup had changed so much because of the loss of our top two players, the struggles, and ultimately the triumphs of the team. Surprisingly, they assigned a large amount of our team's success to "the quiet sophomore with the loud game, defensive standout Sean Porter." There were quotes from some of my teammates about me, and Coach Neville was quoted extensively in the article. There was even a picture taken of me during the Rockton Heights game for the conference championship, frozen just at the moment the ball left my foot on a pass upfield. I hadn't even been aware of a reporter talking to anybody, so it all caught me by surprise.

By the time the Friday of the first sectional game dawned, the Times had come out with their picks for All-Conference honors for all the metropolitan conferences. I was shocked when I got to school and was informed, via an announcement over the intercom by Dr. Osgood, that I had been selected as one of the All-Conference defensemen for our conference, despite the fact that I had not begun the season as a starter for our team.

A college about an hour's bus ride away was hosting sectionals. We were nervous and tense on the ride down. Again, a caravan of cars containing kids and parents supporting us followed our bus to the host field.

Because of the All-Conference selection, and the article in the Metro Times, our opponents started focusing on me a little more. They were double-teaming me and making an effort to pass the ball into the middle of the field before I could get to it. That was fine by me. I sure didn't want to trip myself over my own two feet in an attempt to save the game. If the opposing team was accommodating me by keeping the ball out of my area, so much the better. The end result of that strategy was that when the ball got down into our half of the field, the available playing area, from our adversary's point of view, shrank down in width by a third. It worked just fine to our advantage, especially since we then were presented with an open side when we cleared the ball, the side that Kevin and I patrolled.