Every minute can be deadly in the high-stakes environment of postseason soccer. Fairview felt that rush through all 104 minutes of its 1-0, double-overtime loss to No. 24 Grandview on its home field on Wednesday night.
And with it, the ninth-seeded Knights’ season ended in the first round of the Class 5A state playoffs. All it took was one unlucky bounce on a golden goal opportunity.
“On the throw-in, I stepped to the (Grandview) man,” senior outside back Ben Mitchell said. “He passed it across, it tipped off my toe. Their best player, (Alex Kedzierski), turned, got the ball, turned around our defender, barely tapped the ball and just got enough on to where our keeper couldn’t get his hands to it.”
Fairview’s junior keeper, Caleb Pearson, was a menace toward Grandview’s offense all night leading up to that moment, whether it was stopping the ball right before it crossed the goal line or punching it over the crossbar.
Mitchell took in the thrill of it all, in an opening-round game that nearly went to a shootout, in his final high school contest.
“I mean, it sucks, but that’s the joy of it,” he said. “I was saying to my team before we went into the second overtime, this is where the fun starts. These are the best games. This is what I’m going to miss the most. The blowout games? Those are fun. But the tight games, even the ones you lose, those are the best. That’s the best thing about playoffs, man.”
The Knights got their best chance in the 66th minute, when Ben Ortman took a free kick from just outside of the box. Grandview’s defenders, which had been an iron wall the whole game, deflected the ball away before it had a chance.
Senior Dougal Matheson nearly ended the game in the final 90 seconds of the first overtime, when he took a free kick from Oliver Ruzzin and sent it just inches over the crossbar.
The loss came on the heels of an 8-5-3 season, during which the Knights played neck-and-neck with a nationally-ranked Boulder team — which smacked No. 31 Fountain-Fort Carson with a 9-0 victory just a few miles down the road — and defeated a Broomfield team that enjoyed the No. 3 seed for the 32-team postseason.
Head coach Eric Schuler took pride in his team’s fight, no matter what result it yielded.
“Our message is we prepare to come off the field at the end of the season with a story that we’re going to be proud about telling, not a story that we’re going to regret telling, that we didn’t do our job to prepare or we didn’t do our job culturally to support each other,” he said. “We don’t really focus on if it’s going to be a win or a loss. Tonight was a loss, but the boys did their job.”
Mitchell and his 16 fellow seniors spent years building that culture that has yielded four straight trips to the state tournament and state runner-up honors in 2022.
“Something I’ve been working on our whole year, it’s culture,” Mitchell said. “That’s been a big focus for me. It’s a thing of like, never say die. Don’t stop until it’s done. We came out and we fought to the end.”