When the Blue Devils last battled the Toreros, in August in San Diego, they tied the game 2-2. After that match — the first of the season — Duke surged from No. 20 in the country to No. 2, wrapping up its regular season in a 10-game undefeated streak, the last five all wins. San Diego also soared: The Toreros went 7-1 in the WCC and hold a 7-0 road record. They arrived in Durham hot off a 1-0 win to take UC Davis out of the Big Dance.
They left Durham hot off a 1-0 kill that took Duke out, too.
After a fortnight without a game, No. 10-seed Duke took on San Diego in Koskinen Stadium for their second meeting of the season in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. A fast-paced but ineffective match finally saw a late header goal from the Toreros to knock Duke out of the running.
“We had a great season again,” head coach John Kerr said afterwards. “We have to change this narrative of losing in early rounds of our playoffs at home.”
In minute five, the stands in Koskinen erupted with cheers: Kenan Hot had kicked the ball squarely into the net. But the crowd settled down as it became clear that the goal was a false one, interrupted by a foul call against Duke (11-4-4, 4-1-3 in the ACC). As it turned out, that was the only chance all game the Blue Devil faithful would have to stand on its feet and celebrate a Duke goal.
Sometimes, Kerr likes to hold his best offensive players in reserve. He kept Adam Luckhurst on the sideline for most of the first half, and when he finally subbed him in, he took out Colton Pleasants. But Kerr began the second half with a triple threat at the top of the field — Luckhurst and All-ACC first-team selection Ulfur Bjornsson ready to strike, Pleasants locked and loaded in the midfield — and it had its intended effect. In the first third of the period, the Blue Devils more than doubled the number of shots they had taken in the entire first half. Ruben Mesalles took his team’s first corner of the match. Duke kept WCC Goalkeeper of the Year Donovan Parisian busy, at last.
That title was looking to be more important than ever. As time wound down in the second, both Duke and San Diego faced the mounting pressure of a penalty shoot-out against two keepers who have each been honored as the best in his respective conference.
“They were good and disciplined, and we just wanted to hang in there, kind of like a boxer,” Kerr said. “Just hanging in to survive.”
The Toreros (15-2-2, 7-1 in the WCC) felt that urgency too. Later moments of the second frame filled with opportunities, as they took the ball from Duke’s missed shots and sent it to Wessel Speel’s side of the field. They earned their first corner a few minutes after the Blue Devils did, and their second shortly after.
It was the second that changed the game. Josh Martinez sent the corner to Jack Sandmeyer, whose head butted it in where Speel couldn’t catch it. With under eight minutes to play, Duke was, all of a sudden, praying to face penalty kicks.
It didn’t happen. The Blue Devils sat on the pitch in the sun, heads in hands, scattered across the grass. They didn’t get up for a while.
Kerr called it “a very disappointing ending to a really good season.”
For the first 45 minutes of the playoff match, the ball didn’t spend much of its time in the final third on either end of the field. This game went down in no-man’s land, depriving all 22 players of any reprieve as they battled tirelessly for possession. Nobody took a corner kick, nobody earned any points and there was only one shot on goal in the entire 45-minute stretch. And yet this was some of Duke’s fastest soccer ever.
The game’s first eight minutes saw three free kicks on the field, two for the Toreros and one for the hosts. A sixth free kick accompanied the first yellow card of the match, called on San Diego’s Vicente Ayala for a violent slide tackle on Duke’s Trevor Burns. A seventh gave the ball back to the Toreros. A twelfth lined Ruben Mesalles up for a bender that he sent way over the goal. By the end of the first half, the teams had six fouls each. Combined, they had just five shots, only one on goal by Kamran Acito.
The Toreros took longer to find an opening; Jaxson Findlay had a dart that went just far enough to Wessel Speel’s left that it missed the post by inches. Duke recovered quickly, but Findlay certainly made an impression on the home team: If the Blue Devils didn’t score soon, their visitors would. With just under nine minutes to play in the first half, Findlay took another gander, this time missing up instead of out. The sophomore couldn’t capitalize, but he was nonetheless opening up weak spots in Duke’s usually citadel-strong defense. San Diego has improved since that August matchup.
“They're much more tactically aware of what's going on,” Kerr said. “They maximized their game plan to slow us down.”
Sandmeyer finally broke into the citadel, punctuating the drawn-out tension that had defined 82 minutes of this match. The Blue Devils did not have the time to launch a counter-attack. They closed their second game in a row with a 1-0 loss at home against a team they were ready to beat. A mismatched ending for a season with so much potential. It just doesn’t fit the story.
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Sophie Levenson is a Trinity junior and a sports managing editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.