When DePaul goalkeeper Eric Sorby went down after holding Syracuse to one goal for 56 minutes, senior backup Joe Ferrari stepped in. The Blue Demons goalie would have to keep Syracuse scoreless for the game’s final 34 minutes to give DePaul a chance of winning to secure a spot in the Big East tournament.

He did, and the Orange’s hopes of playing in the postseason were dashed.

‘For a goalkeeper that’s come on and replaced their starting goalkeeper, I think he did very well,’ SU head coach Ian McIntyre said. ‘And ultimately, that last 10, 15 minutes of the game, he was the difference in the game.’

DePaul would eventually break a tie game with the go-ahead goal in the 59th minute to win 2-1 on Saturday in front of 499 spectators at home in Chicago. The win allowed the Blue Demons to clinch the final spot in the Big East tournament over Syracuse. The Orange (3-12-1, 1-7-1 Big East) needed a win against DePaul (6-10-2, 3-5-1 Big East) to gain that final spot, and for the sixth straight year, SU finds itself on the outside looking in at the conference playoffs.

The one-goal loss was familiar for this SU team. Eight of its 12 losses have come by a 2-1 final this year. Most often, Syracuse can only manage one goal out of a flurry of opportunities and allows that extra goal to its opponent. And this game wasn’t any different.

‘I thought we had the talent, I thought we had the players to win this game,’ McIntyre said. ‘We got back in it second half, tied it up very quickly, had a couple chances right after that. … I felt if we would have tied it up, we had every chance of going on and winning this game. But DePaul defended well and their goalkeeper at the end pulled off a couple of very good saves.’

SU’s lone goal of the game came when reserve Grant Chong scored off a loose ball by the net. But in a trend that has happened far too often for SU this season, the opponent came right back. The Blue Demons’ Anthony Hunter scored just 10 minutes later to put DePaul up for good at 2-1.

The Orange had multiple chances to tie the game until the very end, but Nick Roydhouse, Nick Perea, Lars Muller and Louis Clark couldn’t get their shots to find the back of the net in the closing moments. It all amounted to yet another loss for the Orange.

But even though SU finished with four times as many losses as wins in 2011, McIntyre feels this team is better than what its record reads. And though SU failed to make the Big East tournament, he sees this year’s team as better than last year’s, when the Orange couldn’t even win a Big East game and finished with just two wins overall.

‘When you look at our record,’ McIntyre said, ‘your first thought is, ‘This is a poor team.’ And ultimately we didn’t reach our goals this year, which was to make the Big East tournament. We gave it a real good run, and it went down to the last two minutes of this game.

‘But we’ve come a long way in the last 12 months, and those fans and supporters who’ve watched us play this year and saw us play last year, they know that we’ve made a lot of progress. And we came pretty close. Unfortunately, not close enough.’

rnmarcus@syr.edu

Published on October 30, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Rachel: rnmarcus@syr.edu