EXETER – Hopkinton withstood heavy pressure after building a first-half lead. The Hawks then waited through a two-hour, 35-minute lightning delay. They weathered more pressure from Gilford in the second half.
At the end of it all, the Hopkinton field hockey team left Bill Ball Stadium with a 2-1 win and a spot in Sunday’s Division III championship game. The second-seeded Hawks (14-2) will face the winner of Wednesday’s semifinal between No. 1 Mascoma and No. 5 Lebanon, a game that was scheduled to start on Tuesday but was postponed after the weather delay passed the two-hour mark.
“The delay was rough, it was really rough because we’d think we could come back out and then it was, ‘Oh no, there was more lightning, we have to wait another 30 minutes,’ ” Hopkinton coach Patty Connolly said. “It was hard to try to keep the girls focused and understand that we have a big game, and then also just to try to keep them loose.”
The girls took care of the keeping loose part mostly on their own.
“We were just listening to music and dancing and trying to stay positive,” Hopkinton junior Katie Meserve said. “We just wanted to keep the energy up because we had a really awesome first half and we wanted to come out like that again.”
When the teams finally retook the field, Meserve ran to the stands and led an impromptu cheer for the Hopkinton crowd, which included her father, Hopkinton Athletic Director Dan Meserve. Also at the game was Hillsboro-Deering Athletic Director Jay Wood, whose daughter Chloe was at the heart of Hopkinton’s defensive effort.
The No. 6 Golden Eagles (11-6), the 2016 champions, had the edge in possession, shots and chances and spent long stretches of the game attacking Hopkinton. But the Hawks held up under all but one of those moments as Wood, Katelyn Bouchard, Caroline Barrett and Clara Walling played smart, gritty defense and keeper Maddie McCluskey took care of anything that slipped past their wall.
“Gilford did put a lot of pressure on us and they did get a lot of corners in the second half,” Connolly said. “I think Chloe Wood is outstanding back there and also Clara Walling, another senior who is kind of an unsung hero, she had some real nice clears as well. So the defense really, really hung together.”
Not only did Meserve lead some cheers, she also opened the scoring just 6:04 into the game. Hopkinton’s offensive leader, senior Amelia Thomas, started the play when she flipped a free hit over the defense and 30 yards down the turf field. Meserve ran under it like a football wide receiver on a fly pattern, controlled the ball at her feet for another 10 yards and then finished with a shot into the right corner.
“We’ve actually never successfully done that before,” Meserve admitted. “We’ve tried and it just hasn’t gone that well, so that was kind of a surprise and it was a really beautiful pass.”
The Golden Eagles responded to the deficit by attacking in the other direction, but Wood and the Hopkinton defense held. After enduring it for nearly 20 minutes, Hopkinton finally flipped the field on a long run from senior Bekah Underwood down the right wing. Underwood and Thomas worked the ball into the circle to earn a corner, and off that corner the Hawks were awarded a penalty stroke. Thomas stepped up and converted the stroke to give her team a 2-0 edge with 4:21 left in the first half.
Gilford cut into that lead nine minutes into the second half. The Golden Eagles earned a string of five offensive corners and the Hawks defense finally leaked on the fifth one as Gilford’s Laurel Gingrich went into the scrum and poked one past McCluskey to make it 2-1.
The first lightning flash appeared in the sky about two minutes later, at 6:05 p.m. with 18:37 left on the game clock. After seven more signs of lightning, two hours and 40 minutes more delay and more pressure from Gilford, the Hawks had earned a trip to the championship.
“At the beginning of the year we write down all of our goals, our team goal and our personal goal, and every game we sit in a circle when we stretch and we say one goal for the game,” Meserve said. “So this season has been really goal-oriented for us and we’ve really been focusing on achieving our goals day by day … and this is the biggest one yet.”
(Tim O’Sullivan can be reached at 369-3341 or tosullivan@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @timosullivan20)