Just like that, it was over.
After receiving its first NCAA Tournament bid in three years, the men's soccer team watched its national championship hopes slip away in a 3-2 loss to Jacksonville yesterday at Duke Soccer Stadium in the first round of the NCAAs.
Forward Nesa Stefanovic scored the game-winner in the 60th minute when his shot off a feed from midfielder Milos Mamula ricocheted off the left goalpost and into the net.
Making their first NCAA Tournament appearance ever, the Dolphins entered the matchup as heavy underdogs. Jacksonville coach Aleks Mihailovic, however, was not surprised to see his team upend third-seeded Duke.
"It's not an upset, because we came here to win a game," Mihailovic said. "We didn't come here to upset anybody. If any of the guys have upset stomachs, that's a different story, but we came here to play hard. If any of my kids feel it's an upset, they belong somewhere else."
Early on, the Blue Devils appeared to have the game in hand. Forward Troy Garner gave Duke the early lead, driving the ball into an empty net after teammates Ali Curtis and Jay Heaps drew Jacksonville netminder Petar Popovic out of
The Dolphins evened the score in the 38th minute when forward Bole Acimovic drove the ball home, assisted by midfielder Mike Popovic and forward Nesa Stefanovic.
Just over four minutes into the second half, midfielder Hope Chiota drilled an unassisted shot into the lower right corner of the net to give Jacksonville a 2-1 lead.
After Stefanovic's goal, Duke retaliated from the 3-1 deficit in the 72nd minute of the game, when Heaps nailed a pass from midfielder Stephen Pate straight past Petar Popovic and into the back of the net.
But try as they might, the Blue Devils could not find the elusive game-tying goal. Despite racking up 14 shots, twice as many as the Dolphins, in the course of the game, they could not send the game to overtime. Shot after shot went just high, just wide or seemingly straight into the hands of Petar Popovic.
"We had more than enough chances to score a lot of goals," Duke coach John Rennie said. "We should have had three goals in the first half, but we only had one. We should have had a lot of goals in the second half, but we didn't. It's our
In an extremely physical contest, Duke and Jacksonville accumulated a total of 43 fouls, most of which came after intermission. The Dolphins tallied five yellow cards within a 24-minute span in the second stanza, and the Blue Devils recorded three of their own during the same stretch. Mike Popovic capped off the string of fouls with a red card when he knocked down Duke's Noah Lewkowitz in the 75th minute.
"They started kicking, so we started kicking," defender Evan Whitfield said. "That's how games get rough."
With a quick NCAA Tournament outing over, all that remains for the Blue Devil seniors is to reflect on their careers.
"It's been an exciting four years," Heaps said. "We've had some great guys, great teams. We put all our eggs in one basket here at the end, and it's really disappointing because there were those two years in-between when we didn't get in and we thought we should have been in.
"It was real important, and we had so many things to prove. A lot of it weighs down right now, and a lot of us are going to be real upset because we'd wanted to come out and prove so much to everybody."
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