It took four tries to earn a positive result the first time around.

Tuesday, they went one round less, but it was North Yarmouth Academy doing the celebrating.

Charlotte Eisenberg collected the ball at the right post and slid it past Lisbon keeper Stevie Charest on the team’s third penalty corner, and the Panthers’ defense held Lisbon off on its third attempt to lift NYA to a 2-1 Western Class C field hockey victory at Thornton Academy’s Hill Stadium.

“It stinks when it comes down to penalty corners, because it could literally go either way,” Lisbon coach Julie Wescott said. “I told the girls after the game, that could have been us on Saturday (against Dirigo). So, we got here, they left it on the field, and that’s sports.”

The Panthers, meanwhile, are off to the Class C state title game for the fifth time in six seasons, the lone miss coming a year ago in a loss to Lisbon, the eventual Class C state champion.

The Panthers’ unlikely hero, Eisenberg couldn’t say after the game how the ball even got to her stick. Not that she cared much.

“I’ve been on the post practicing tips all season,” Eisenberg said. “I’ve missed a lot more than I’ve scored, too. They always tell me, you have to get in there with a strong stick, and this time I was able to get my stick on it (and) stop it. I took a moment, and I looked up, but I didn’t want to take my stick off the ball … I just kept my stick on the ball and pushed it as hard as I could.”

“At the beginning of the game, I didn’t want to tell the team about Lisbon, I said, ‘Let me tell you about yourselves,'” NYA coach Tracy Quimby said. “What I said about Charlotte was, ‘You’re the quiet one. You’re the one nobody notices, and you sneak down and they don’t worry about you so much.’ But that’s exactly what she did today.”

That effort came on the third penalty corner attempt for the Panthers. They then had to wait as Lisbon tried its third corner. The NYA defense, led between the pipes by keeper Elizabeth Coughlin, stuffed the Greyhounds.

“She’s a great goalie, and I told the girls, she’s going to stop the (point) blank shots,” Wescott said. “She stopped everything today.”

“She had more than 19 saves I think today,” Quimby said. “I can’t say enough about Coughy. The problem is, I don’t know that people see it as much. Unless you get a team like (Lisbon), no one is going to know how good she is.”

Lisbon played the game without senior midfielder Bailey Cutler, who suffered an injury earlier in the day and couldn’t suit up.

“We had to tweak everything today, too, because of an injury,” Wescott said. “We moved some things around and we had to adjust to that from the start.

NYA also went through some readjustments, as the Panthers lost senior Kayla Rose in thew second half to a head injury.

The game started under unusual circumstances. After warmups and player introductions, and after both teams took the field for the opening touch, the three game officials gathered at the scoring table, consulted the rule book and informed Lisbon that they would have to remove their black leggings and long sleeve shirts because they didn’t match the team’s white home jerseys.

The temperature when the game finally began was 42 degrees.

The Panthers got on the board first with 10:39 to play in the first half when Kayla Rose converted a feed across the circle from Olivia Madore at the left post. The ball slipped through two defenders and Charest and rattled the back of the cage.

“That kind of fired us up,” Wescott said. “It was a shift in momentum, and we tried to work off that the best we could.”

Lisbon mounted a quick reply with some offensive pressure, but couldn’t get a shot in on goal until less than a minute remained in the opening half.

Neither team forced a penalty corner in the opening half, either, and whistles were at a minimum as the teams trekked quickly up and down the field.

The Greyhounds fed off their halftime adjustments and immediately put a load of pressure on the NYA defense. They forced three penalty corners and quickly put four shots toward the cage. On the third corner and fourth shot, Olivia Harrington drilled a ball that appeared to be going wide, but it redirected off a defender’s ankle and into the net to knot the score at 1-1.

“We talked about coming out with some fire,” Wescott said. “They did, and they played their hearts out, and you can’t ask for anything more than that.”

jpelletier@sunjournal.com

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