The moment, sudden and eventually fatal, just felt cruel.
Massachusetts certainly deserved the goal. It had pestered No. 11 seed Virginia at the evening’s beginning and then moved on to peppering the hosts with shots, controlling the game, flipping the narrative.
But like this? A ball whipped across, a save by the game’s best player, a helpless defender only able to watch as the ball slammed into his leg and trundled into the goal? But that is how, in the 72nd minute, it happened. And it remained the game's only goal as the Minutemen (13-3-5) earned a 1-0 upset of the Cavaliers (11-7-3) Saturday at Klöckner Stadium to advance to the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals.
They will travel to face No. 3 seed Denver on Thursday or Friday, aiming to continue a flaming run through the tournament. Virginia will head home. Or, more accurately, stay home. The Cavaliers, for the third season in a row, lost a home game to an unseeded opponent in the second or third round.
“When you get to the round of 16 of the NCAA Tournament, each team is here for a reason,” Coach George Gelnovatch said. “This team was difficult to break down, very direct and hard to deal with. And we knew that would be the case.”
At the final buzzer, the bench meandered slowly out to the field. Senior forward Kome Ubogu rested on his bum, jersey over his face. Sophomore forward AJ Smith sank into a crouch. Junior midfielder Albin Gashi leaned back on his arms.
And senior goalkeeper Joey Batrouni, crouching, forearms on his thighs, stared at the ground. He had given it every ounce he had.
He summoned an incredible double save in the first half, charging blindly off his line and then somehow positioning himself for the next shot. He blocked a one-on-one opportunity, closing down a player after a free kick skittered through the defense.
He stepped up into a thicket of limbs, spreading wide again, making a save again. He stood sturdy on another block. All saves, of course, are not made equal. Batrouni made six of them. Almost all proved incredible.
“The guy can stand on his head to save you when you need it,” Adam Perron, the team’s associate head coach and goalkeepers coach, said in an interview last week. "We definitely need him at his best. And if he is, we’re going to be hard to beat.”
Those words proved prescient. But hard to beat does not mean impossible.
In the 72nd minute, Massachusetts senior defender Matt Fordham recycled a cross, beat graduate midfielder Daniel Mangarov down the endline, rifled a low ball across.
Batrouni, hunched at the near post, flung out a leg. It stopped the ball from flying across the goalmouth. But the ball shot sideways. Toward junior defender Parker Sloan.
Sloan could do nothing. He only hopped awkwardly as the ball bounced off his leg, then bent over disbelievingly at the waist. It seemed cruel, even at the moment, that Virginia — defending frantically for so long, back against the wall — would concede on such a twist of misfortune.
Massachusetts, though, made its own luck. The narrative coming in said that Virginia would hold heavy possession, and that Massachusetts would deploy its vaunted press, hoping to counterattack, to play the role of lucky spoiler. It looked that way only briefly.
“We have to be very careful on the counter,” Gelnovatch said this week on the Wahoo Central podcast. “We have to be very careful and good on all of our defensive restarts.”
The Minutemen launched their expected long throws. They pressed hard, clogging up passing lanes, disrupting. But then they seemed to realize they could do more than just turn their opponent’s passing exchanges more sketchy. They could, in fact, commandeer the whole thing.
Which they did. And continued doing in the second half. Until the goal.
You had to wonder about all the what-ifs. What if sophomore Brendan Lambe, a dynamo in the midfield and in defense, had not been out with a calf injury? What if junior defender Nick Dang had converted the free header that materialized in the third minute? What if junior defender Grant Howard had not exited in the first half with an injury?
They piled up into a mound, all those hypotheticals. But at the end, the only thing to see was the visitors running onto the field, and Massachusetts graduate forward Johan Feilscher crowing incredulously, and another opportunity gone.
“It took an own goal to decide the game,” Gelnovatch said. “It’s obviously disappointing, but the guys played hard, played well, and we came up on the wrong side today.”
Virginia had its opportunities. Dang, who defended strongly as always, missed the header. Smith scythed a decent look at a volley over the goal. The Minutemen defense denied a nice maneuver between Mangarov and Smith.
Gelnovatch started Smith and junior forward Triton Beauvois up top for the second straight game. He subbed in graduate forward Hayes Wood, now scoreless in 15 games, at halftime and tried Ubogu and junior forward Cesar Cordova late.
Virginia tried one more time at the end, smacking the ball forward, hoping for one final chance. But the assistant referee raised his flag for offsides. Dang looked at the assistant and shrugged his arms helplessly.
That encapsulated the way things went. The same story, for the third year in a row.
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