Tuesday night at McCaskey, the boys soccer team qualified for district playoffs. This was a #11 vs #6 seed matchup with Mechanicsburg visiting from the suburban Harrisburg area, about a 45-mile drive. The Red Tornado took two separate one-goal leads but were caught both times, Mechanicsburg's second goal came with just two minutes left in regulation play. After eighty minutes of regulation and another thirty minutes of overtime the game was resolved via penalty kicks, the soccer equivalent of a hockey shootout. It took nine rounds and thirteen total goals for the visitors to prevail 3-2. The game started shortly after 7:00 and wasn't over until 9:50, with it all I got home almost three hours after it began. Jenny and I had our usual lunch date on Wednesday, on Friday evening we were back at McCaskey for the final game of football season. The team began with two wins in the first three games, from there it was all downhill if not outright freefall. On this night visiting Penn Manor entered having scored forty-eights points on the season and exited with a 44-6 win. The lone score for JPM came on a Jalen Cintron four-yard carry in the third quarter, the two-point convert failed. The last winning season for the program was in 2010, in fourteen years since the mark is 29-111 (if it was baseball we'd be entering serious White Sox territory). The two victories were by an average of seventeen points, the eight losses were by an average of thirty-five. The highlight of the night was the annual Senior Night activities, in the pregame I introduced thirteen players and twelve cheerleaders and at halftime one of the associate band directors emceed their festivities (gives me a chance to take a breath and relax). Take care, thanks for reading.
