Above – Pope’s Drew Minchew scored 6 goals and 1 assist FLN ranks Pope John Paul II’s win over Boca Raton Friday night as the second most thrilling high school lacrosse comeback in the City of Boca Raton’s short lacrosse history.  The standard is (and most likely will forever be) Benjamin’s 16-0 second half run to defeat Dwyer 18-16 in the semi-finals of the club state championships on April 16, 2010 held at Boca High.  Many of the young men who played in that 2010 game went on to play college sports. Many of the young men who played Friday night are headed to the next level, too. First, kudos to the real Pope team playing its game.  As Seth Austin mentioned in his article, the team which played St. Andrew’s was not reflective of the talent on the squad.   This Pope team fought for every ground ball, played suffocating defense and made beautiful shots.  Oh, the very same effort was put forth by the Boca Bobcats.  The pictures above give you a feel for how the game was played.

As anyone who has a twitter account is aware, the officiating played a roll in this game.  It made people angry, it made coaches upset, it took away from the game.  But when you break it down and look at the stats, it was equally horrible on both sides.  It did not determine the outcome of the game.  If you must pick out one single thing to hang this game on it would have to be Drew Minchew’s six goal, one assist performance.  Or it could be an amazing series of late game saves by Niko Morfogen which saw him leave the field to chants of MVP, MVP from the crowd of students storming the field.  Or it could have been the 11 of 15 face off performance by Johnny Hanlon before he left the game with an injury midway though the third quarter. The game was 6-5 at the half.  A two minute non-releasable called against Pope was capitalized on by Boca for two goals who then scored two more to take a four goal run up to 10-5. Drew Minchew finally stopped the bleeding at the 6:07 mark.  Then two unlikely heroes emerged, Patrick Brower (assisted by Minchew) and Ryan McMahon both scored goals only 18 seconds apart.  Coach Andy Bolger marked this 18 seconds as the turning point in the game for his Eagles.  Drew Minchew scored his fifth goal of the game to with about a minute left in the quarter to bring the Eagles to within one. Early in the fourth quarter Minchew put an exclamation point on his big night as he dodged, rolled back, and ripped a laser shot off hip to tie the game at 10 goals  a piece.

With 8:21 left in the game Niko Morfgen threw a perfect strike to Drew Minchew who passed up the field to freshman Shawn Gildea.  Gildea found fellow freshman Jared Chaloux in the alley who then made the cross crease pass to Mikey Urso for what would be the game winner. Morfogen was huge down the stretch, taking a hit which resulted in a penalty against Boca that further ignited his team and his stat of 8 second half saves doesn’t even come close to explaining the magnitude of some of his late game heroics in the goal.  The kid played a career game. Yes, this game had twenty-six and a half (26 1/2) minutes of total penalties.  Most went against Pope in the second quarter and most went against Boca in the third.  One good example of the “over officiating” which occurred was a mouth piece penalty called in the fourth quarter.  Who is even looking for that in a game like this at a time like that? But this was a big comeback in a huge rivalry game against a great team.  If this went one goal the other way we would be talking about the huge game that Nick McCabe had (four goals.)  It takes two solid teams to burn down the place like these guys did on Friday night.  We hope next time the refs will take a back seat and let the experts steal the show! Finally, let’s talk District Play-Off seeding. Most of District 23’s games have been played, and Pope, Boca and St. Andrew’s have wins against each other and one loss each.  Spanish River (5-3 and on a five game winning streak after losing 9-7 to Boca) hosts Pope on March 28.  If Spanish River wins, Boca becomes the top seed as a result of the head to head win over St. Andrew’s.  If Pope wins, Pope, Boca and SA will all be 3-1 in district play, kicking off the three-way tie-breaker as defined in Section 13.3.3 of the FHSAA manual:

1)  Won-loss record in district – All 3-1 2)  Won-loss record in district competition of the tied schools versus the highest-seeded school – All even (this appears to be useful for lower seeds) 3)  Number of district victories on the road in district games: St. Andrew’s -2 Pope – 1 Boca – 0

4)  Number of district victories at home in district games 5)  Blind draw St. Andrew’s happened to play more games on the road this year than Boca and Pope, so it had more opportunities for wins. At the end of the day, the road to the state play-offs goes through each other anyway, but it does make the upcoming Pope vs. River game more interesting.