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With Alta holding a 3-2 lead in the 5A girl's soccer championship game with stoppage time grinding down, Davis' Mackenzie Harrison sprinted down the right side and snuck past the Hawks' back line. The Davis sideline tensed in anticipation and the entire Darts section in the East side of Rio Tinto Stadium was quiet for the first time as Katie Taylor saw found Harrison. Standing right in front of the goal, Harrison poked in the game-tying goal with 10 seconds left in stoppage time.
Harrison could barely raise her hands in celebration before a mob of teammates swallowed her whole. Running back to the midfield line, she switched from digging her hands into her face to putting her hands on her head to catch her breathe as she walked past bouncing teammates. The coaching staff looked like a shell of the tantrum-riddled tyrants they showed off seconds earlier. Instead, they were hopping around in adolescence elation.
Once Harrison got back in position for kickoff, she found enough breath to smile.
"You don't really think it's going happen, and then it happens, and you're just so happy, I'll always remember it," Harrison said. "I just knew we needed to score, and we only had ten seconds left, so I was just going do everything I could to put it in. I thought we were going to win."
If only that goal could've been the ending to Davis' season.
After the celebration subsided and regulation stopped, Davis barely escaped 20 minutes of overtime
Davis started with the hot foot, sending Harrison in for the first penalty kick. She missed. Shocked, she buried her face into palms and kept them there as she blindly walked all the way back to her teammates near midfield. Harrison couldn't watch for the rest of the shoot-out.
"I was devastated. I didn't think it actually happened. I always make them in practice, I don't miss," Harrison said through tears. "I couldn't believe it, it was awful."
The next miss determined the championship.
With the rest of her team sitting in a line, cross--legged and holding hands at midfield, Katelyn McLeod came in front of Alta's Tasha Long for the seventh penalty kick. With most of her teammates too afraid to look and nervous goose bumps running up her legs, the unthinkable happened.
Long dove and got a piece of the ball. As the ball trickled off Long's hand and rolled past the right of the goal, McLeod keeled over, hands on her knees, before the ball stopped moving. She tried to catch her breathe. Looking like the wind got knocked out of her, McLeod couldn't move as Alta's goalkeeper Tasha Long ran past her and took her spot directly at the bottom of the celebratory dogpile.
Lifeless, Mcleod's team finally arrived as she went limp, collapsing into her teammates' arms.
"We knew in our heart we are a better team than they are," said Davis goalkeeper Jamie Wilkinson. "All the emotion and all the hype, you have to focus. I felt pretty focused, it just didn't turn out our way."
Whimpers muddled the Darts' speech as Alta earned its fourth straight victory lap to "We Are the Champions", the picturesque ending Davis was hoping for just 20 minutes earlier.
With the medley of emotions all coming to a head in moments like this, Davis head coach Souli Phongsavath knew that the heightened stage might have hindered his team. Either way, he didn't see a thing in his team's play that he couldn't take pride in.
"I'm very proud of our girls," Phongsavath said. "In a game that's so intense like this, I think they're all going on emotion, and the girls did that to play that hard for that long. I don't think they finish that game, or even go into overtime, without that emotion and adrenaline going. We weren't going to just give it to them, they were going to have to take it, and to their credit, they took it, so congratulations to them."
