As the final seconds leaked away, Virginia’s dwindling prayer only burrowed into the stomach of UNC Greensboro sophomore goalkeeper Seth Wilson.
Sophomore midfielder Brendan Lambe stayed on the pitch, in the spot outside the endline where he had tumbled after whipping in his prayer of a cross, facedown, body pressed into the ground.
He remained there for a minute, his opponents dancing away, the buzzer signaling Virginia’s latest unsatisfying result. The Cavaliers (2-4-3, 0-2-2 ACC) failed, for the sixth time in a row, to win a game, losing 2-1 to the Spartans (4-1-3, 0-0 SoCon) Tuesday at Klöckner Stadium.
“Another one of those games,” Coach George Gelnovatch said postgame.
This is what a historic desolate streak looks like. It looks like Lambe lying prone on the endline on the soaked grass, exhausted and with nothing left to give. It looks like the picture the postgame painted, a group of players bunched tightly around one coach, who talked and talked, saying things his guys probably already knew. It looks like no wins in six games, tied for the program’s longest winless streak since 1967.
“That’s about the time I was born,” Gelnovatch said. “So it’s a long time.”
For a historically great program, this loss stings. The goal that sealed the defeat came late, in the 86th minute. The referee could have given a penalty against graduate forward Hayes Wood, who had charged in from behind and seemingly denied an obvious scoring opportunity inside the penalty area. But he neglected to blow his whistle. He did not, it turned out, have to.
A moment later, UNC Greensboro junior midfielder Daniel Longo galloped onto the ball and blasted it into the net, erasing all the lively soccer Virginia had played the entire second half and rendering moot the fact that it had outshot its opponent by 17-7.
“For the most part in this game, I was satisfied,” Gelnovatch said. “I gotta be honest with you. The way we were moving the ball, the way we were defending.”
The Spartans had opened the scoring in the 13th minute, on their first shot, a thunderbolt from inside the box. But the Cavaliers discovered something toward the end of the first half, turning an invisible corner. The belief, heading into halftime, felt palpable.
It was unclear who actually scored the equalizer, though the box score officially chalked it down to freshman midfielder Luke Burns. The ball had drifted to the back post, after graduate midfielder Daniel Mangarov and senior defender Luc Mikula worked a beautiful set piece, inviting a motley scrum of players to slide toward it. Somehow, off a knee or a shin or a foot, it found the net.
It did not matter how it got there. Only that it had, and that it delivered Virginia an equalizer.
“A good comeback,” Gelnovatch said. “Second half, good energy, good belief. Get that goal. And I feel like we’re pushing for a second one, pushing for the second goal, and we get caught on the counter.”
For 86 minutes, things had felt different, felt the way they should. Virginia dominated the possession, looking confident and dangerous, manufacturing chances. They knocked on the door, then banged on it.
The challenging circumstances made it doubly impressive. Junior midfielders Albin Gashi and Umberto Pela missed the game, Gashi to serve a one-game red-card suspension and Pela because of injury. They are two of the team’s three captains.
UNC Greensboro, a formidable foe ranked in one of the polls, always presented a tall task. Virginia also lacked the full benefits of its home-field advantage, because of the postponement that had moved the game from Monday at 7 p.m. to Tuesday at 1 p.m.
That timing is not exactly conducive to a bumping atmosphere. It left the hill bare, browning from all the recent rain. It left the stands, which had been crammed all season, filled with a smattering of maybe a couple dozen patrons.
Then there is another wrinkle — Gelnovatch essentially reconfigured the starting lineup in an effort to break the winless streak. Instead of Gashi and Pela, it was junior defender Nick Dang who donned the captain’s armband.
“It’s different from the beginning of the season,” Dang said. “Because that’s what we practiced all year. But at the same time, this game is all about adapting.”
The missing captains required alternatives. Beyond that, though, sophomore forward Cesar Cordova and junior forward Triton Beauvois started for the first time in four games, and junior forward David Okorie for the first time in his career.
Lambe, who moved to left back this offseason in a successful experiment, played in the midfield for the second game in a row — as sophomore defender Victor Akoum filled his spot. This was Akoum’s second start ever, and both starts have come in the team’s last two games. The second half also saw junior defender Grant Howard, a Virginia Tech transfer, debut for Virginia after struggling with injury issues.
It seemed, at times, like watching an entirely different team. This was a jarring departure from the recognizable lineup Gelnovatch rolled out over the season’s first month.
“When you get in a winless streak like this, you start trying different things,” Gelnovatch said. “It’s natural to try some different things and some different players.”
The changes seemed to work. But the result never came.
So Virginia, as Gelnovatch and Dang both stressed, will look to the next game. The opponent, Friday at Klockner at 7 p.m., will be No. 19 Virginia Tech. That seems like the ideal moment, after a barren period of more than a month, to break this winless streak. To get their season back on track, the Cavaliers must fix this historically dismal funk.
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