BROOMFIELD — Through the first 11 games of the spring season, no one could take down Broomfield girls soccer. That streak, naturally, ended with a crosstown rivalry.
On a stormy Thursday night in Broomfield, Legacy struck the Eagles down with a 1-0 victory, thanks in large part to the late-game heroics of senior keeper Riley Hennings. She made not one, not two, but four incredible saves in the last five minutes to secure the Lightning win.
No part of her body was safe, and she threw it on the line time and time again to thwart one last aggressive offensive surge from Broomfield. She wanted to make absolutely certain that Makayla Martinez’s goal in the 48th minute didn’t go to waste.
“You probably saw me jumping as high as I could,” Hennings said of the goal. “That’s all we want. We just want to score, so I was just super excited. My defenders came back and I said, ‘We’re not getting scored on.’”
The Lightning brought an added level of physicality to the contest, with players colliding left and right. Broomfield senior Charlotte Hansen said that took the Eagles out of their element, even just briefly, to allow Martinez to sneak one past them. For the first time all season, they couldn’t recover.
Prior to Thursday, they boasted a 10-0-1 record and owned eight shutouts.
“I think it says a lot about us and how well we’ve been doing this season,” Hansen said. “But like we just talked about at the end, good teams need to lose sometimes, too, because now we know what that feeling feels like and we know that we never want to feel it again. I think we fought hard. This was a crosstown rivalry. They really brought the physicality and the effort tonight, so we’re not disappointed with our effort.”
The Eagles, of course, had several tantalizing chances to score. Just two minutes into the second half, senior midfielder Emmerson Peller took a straight shot on goal from about 25 yards out. The ball hit the crossbar, flew down, then bounced back out.
Twenty minutes later, Broomfield nearly tied the game up with a long free kick, but a Legacy player redirected the ball over her own goal with a header. The Lightning did everything in their power to avert yet another draw, and improved to 6-2-3 with their stunner over the Eagles.
The Lightning will hit the (long) road to Fruita Monument on Saturday, while the Eagles make the short trip to Boulder on the same day to wrap up the regular season. Next week, the North and South divisions of the Front Range League will go to war to see who will reign FRL supreme heading into the Class 5A state playoffs.
Legacy has quite the boost to carry itself forward.
“For me, personally, I think beating Broomfield’s the biggest win you can get when you’re on a Legacy team, so this is pretty high (on my list),” Hennings said. “I was just excited to be out there with my team, and we really showed up tonight.”
