Winter weather warnings flashed on signs along the highway. Hartford Athletic’s players and coaches must’ve seen them on their drive north to Maine for their game against the Portland Hearts of Pine in the Second Round of the Open Cup. A raw grey weeknight at the start of April at the Lewiston High School football field, and winter lived in the wind. Blankets on the bleachers, the smell of snow and grilled sausage in the air. It made a person hungry.
A woman in the stands pulled packs of ponchos from her bag. A dozen or more.
“You came prepared,” someone in the row behind her said.
“I figured if I bought them all it wouldn’t rain.”
So, hunger and luck. Let’s talk about this game.
Hearts of Pine vs. Hartford Athletic was a Second Rounder defined by desire
First thirty minutes, Portland had chances, Hartford had chances. Hearts were the underdog but you wouldn’t know it; even was the play, level was the skill.
It was a game played in the air. Handless basketball. Head, head, chest, volley, the ball was up and up and up again. The men were up and up and up again. Launch, leap, collide, get.
And in this way, it was a game of second balls. The ball’s up, small soft moon rising into the night, it’s coming down, and there’s the matter of first to. Who’s there? Who gets it? In the land of first to, Hearts and Hartford were matched.
Who’s there after that first to touch? After it blasts off the head thigh shin boot, squeezed between two players battling for control of it? Who’s there for the second ball?
Who wants it?
The second ball is a matter of desire.
And desire is where a small team can beat a bigger team. It’s different than competitiveness, which moves in the veins of every player on the field, no one becomes an athlete without it. Desire though, the heat and mystery, the raw thing that lives below the naval, in the space between the lungs, at the back of the skull, that’s the driving force, the thing that makes you move faster and harder than you thought you could, that fuels you when you weren’t sure how much was left, that makes you move toward what you want. The hunger. Who wants it?
Around the 30th minute, Hartford felt the Hearts’ desire and it rattled them. It frightened them. And when people are scared they get angry and the temperature of the game went up. Things got scrappy, edged, a little rougher. Hartford’s towering goalkeeper, Antony Siaha, sensed things spinning weird. He was kitted out pink as a cat’s tongue in the yawning jaws of the net, and he hollered at his teammates.
No score at the half, and Hartford’s play turned cynical, turned scared. Scuffles in front of the net, men talking with their faces close, the fast-slow sense that something might, at any second, detonate. Antics and shenanigans, and Portland, for the most part, did not bite.
Aerial battles were the order of the day on a cold night in Lewiston
No score after 90 minutes and into overtime it went.
Who wants it?
And what’s it here?
It, the ball. It, possession. It, the chance. It, the goal. It, the win. It, the satisfaction, the feeling in bed that night that no matter the scoreline you pressed as hard as you could, left nothing in the tank but whispers. Because on a cold weeknight in April, this, in the end, is what’s at stake.
Early into extra time Portland’s Azaad Liadi pulled a second yellow and off the field he went. And with twelve minutes left in the game, Hartford’s Jordan Scarlett scored a goal. The crushed hush in the crowd, the desperate looks at the clock. The soul ransacked. Right then, snow started to fall as the signs on the highway foretold. Maybe you know the feeling of oxygen evacuating a stadium when the opposing team scores. Here, for a moment, that happened, the deflated disbelief. No, no. It can’t be. But it was and time was running out.
But it was strange, too. That shattered atmosphere did not last. The crowd sensed it was still a matter of time. The goal wasn’t enough to shake us from our want.
Nor did it shake the Hearts’ want. And maybe it made it stronger.
Three minutes left. Who wants it? Two subs in, Evan Southern and Jake Keegan, and Southern launched the ball up toward Keegan, and the ball flew and the Hartford goalie was out of his box as the ball descended toward the earth. And it landed on the tired turf of this high school football field. It dropped there and it made a strange bounce, physics or the occult, who knows, the ball abides by its own rules and all players can do is try to follow them.
Keegan lifts his epic OT equalizer over the outstanding Antony Siaha of Hartford Athletic
And there was Keegan, who wants it, who’d just been subbed in, who wants it, fresh legs on the 33-year-old. And he leapt up and Siaha in pink leapt up and Keegan chipped the ball, who wants it, and Siaha went higher, all his height, up in the air, who wants it, and the ball went over his head and over his raised hands, and no, no, yes, too good to be true, up it went, fast and slow, and two Hartford players sprinted towards the net with everything in them but they couldn’t beat it, the ball was following its own rules. It fell to the turf just in front of the goal line. It bounced into the goal. Everyone lost their minds.
And let’s take a moment to talk about joy. To talk about full-body, every-cell joy. To talk about the leaping up, the yelling, the screaming from a place you’d forgotten was there. To talk about raising your arms in praise and thrill and relief. To talk about losing track of your body, when you become everyone else’s body, absorbed in the totality of the joy, it is ecstasy, it is euphoria, it is full-body. And you realize how much you wanted it. So bad. You wanted it so bad.
And into penalty kicks it went. And those aren’t a matter of desire, not penalty kicks. Penalty kicks are a matter of nerve and luck. Say your prayers to the gods of ball and foot and net. Deep breath and get centered. Want can get you here, but luck and nerve take over now.
On Hartford’s third attempt, when it was level at two, Hearts’ goalkeeper Hunter Morse got his left hand in front of Sebastian Anderson’s shot and blocked it. Nerve and luck. Nathan Messer lifted Portland’s score to three, then Hartford’s Michee Ngalina, a top-scorer on the team, lost his nerve and the ball flew over the goal. Then Southern shot and scored to win and Siaha sat on the ground and the game was lost and won on the field of desire, on the field of nerve and luck, as they all are, and the next morning, in the strange soft place between sleep and waking, the body remembers the night before. The body remembers the satisfaction and the want.
Nina MacLaughlin is a writer. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Find her on Instagram at @ninamaclaughlin.
