Follow up on yesterday's events

I didn't have a ton of interest in writing a long entry yesterday, so I left my soccer report at the bare facts, but I have to comment on how the men's game finished, because it's totally everything I love about sports.

If you were to peruse the tournament info, you would find that Messiah's senior GK Nick Blossey was named the Most Outstanding Player of the tournament. Were you to look at a box score for the title game, however, with no other information, you'd probably scratch your head. Blossey is in there, but with a 0:00 under the "Minutes" column, with junior teammate Jared Clugston having logged 110 minutes, the full regulation and both overtimes. If you go back to the semi-final game, you won't find him in the box score at all. In fact, the last box score you'll find him in with any minutes to his name would be the November 8th Commonwealth Conference championship game against Widener. Yes, that's right - Nick Blossey was named the Outstanding Player of a tournament that he didn't log a single minute of official playing time in.

Crazy, right? Well, not so much. You'll also notice that the game went into a penalty kick shootout. There's nothing that says that the goalie who plays in the regular game has to be the goalie for the shootout. It would seem counterintuitive to put your backup goalie in with the national title on the line, but that's exactly what Messiah did. Blossey is noticeable taller than Clugston, and according to Messiah coach Dave Brandt is probably a better pure shotstopper, though Clugston possesses other skills that make him the choice for the job during a normal game. Even factoring in those advantages, it still seems kind of crazy to bring a cold (literally, it was in the 30s in Greensboro) goalie off the bench at the pivotal moment.

But man, was Blossey up to the task. You'll see that the final score of the shootout was 3-0 Messiah. Yep, Blossey didn't allow a goal in a penalty shootout. If you don't really know soccer, you probably don't necessarily appreciate what that means. A penalty kick places the ball at the center of goal, 12 yards away, with the goalie on his line and not allowed to move forward off that line (to cut down the shooter's angle) until the shooter touches the ball. Penalty kicks are supposed to go into the goal, especially at this level. In order to make a save on a properly struck penalty shot, without cheating forward, a goalie basically has to guess correctly where the shooter is going to go with the ball, dive and hope. You'll often see a shooter just rip the ball right where the goalie is originally standing, assuming they are going to go one way or the other. Misses in a shootout more often result from a shooter trying too hard to fake out the goalie, or trying to place it too perfectly, and they just miss the goal, than from a save. Messiah's lone miss of the shootout was an example of this.

However, Blossey saved all 3 attempts he saw, guessing right each time and deflecting the ball safely away from the goal. And none of these were cheap saves. I'm sure the Stevens shooters did something wrong, like I said, PKs are supposed to wind up in the back of the net no matter how good the goalie, but these were very well placed shots that Blossey had to fully lay out for. A truly transcendant performance.

By the way, I hate PK shootouts. They are probably the worst way any sport of note resolves tie games. I felt this way when Messiah somehow always lost them, and I still feel that way though they've won a couple at critical moments over the last several years. However, in this case, they afforded the opportunity for one of the best stories I've encountered. You just couldn't even write this if you were trying. The guy spends his entire career as a backup (I believe he's made about 5 starts in 4 years), doesn't play a minute in the NCAA tournament, and then gets thrown in at the absolute pivotal moment and comes up with an all-world performance. Let's say it again - Nick Blossey's participation in this year's tournament lasted all of 5 minutes, and didn't even register as a minute for the stats, and yet he was named the Outstanding Player of the tournament, and I don't hear anyone arguing. Were soccer a more prominent sport in the US, and had this happened at a higher level, Blossey would probably already be fielding calls from Disney to secure the movie rights. (If only this had happened last year when the finals were actually AT Disney World)

It's hard to even wrap your head around it, and this is why, to me, sports will always be the best "reality tv". (Even though this wasn't technically on TV...)