FARMINGTON — Intensity and tenacity are the perfect seasoning to any game plan, but sometimes neither is enough to overcome the flavor of talent and skill.
Mt. Blue remained unbeaten to start the season on Tuesday, turning its flashes of skill into a 2-0 win over Cony in a Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference Class A field hockey game, despite a subpar effort from start to finish. Junior Ella Stone had a goal and an assist in the win, senior midfielder Molly Harmon dictated the pace of play far too often for the Rams to counter and senior goalie Brooke Bolduc made six saves to post her third shutout of the season for Mt. Blue (5-0). With the win, Mt. Blue is one of only two unbeaten teams left in Class A North.
Skowhegan is the other.
“We’ve been working really hard, so this is showing what we’ve been working towards,” Harmon said of the team’s start to the season.
Cony (2-2) was on the front foot from the get-go both in the first and second halves, and the Rams turned those quick starts into plenty of pressure but nothing in the way of a game-changing goal. Instead, Mt. Blue was able to transition quickly and almost immediately put Cony’s goal under siege.
That game plan worked well in taking a 1-0 lead off the stick of Kelsey Dorman just over 10 minutes into the contest, and the Cougars used the same recipe when Stone scored with 4:09 left in the first half to make it a 2-0 game.
“Finding the openings by the goal and being in the right spot where you need to be is the key for us,” Stone said.
Similarly, the second half followed a similar script and seemed eager to add at least one more goal in either direction. But Bolduc was at her best with a sliding stop in front of the cage on Cony’s Sophie Whitney midway through the half, having earlier turned away point-blank opportunities from Whitney and Anna Reny inside the opening five minutes.
When Bolduc wasn’t in position to make a stop, she got much needed help from her teammates — notably Bailey Levesque, who cleared a would-be goal off the line with 7:30 remaining.
“Our midfield game seemed pretty strong, but we just weren’t as intense and aggressive in the circle and in front of the cage as we were out in the field,” Cony coach Holly Daigle said. “Mt. Blue’s a very strong, solid team. In the second half we played more aggressive, and we’ll learn from that going into a game on Thursday against Messalonskee.”
“Cony was moving, they’re fast, and they really wanted it (in the second half),” Mt. Blue coach Jody Harmon said. “I felt like we were being outplayed in the ‘want’ and ‘intensity’ parts of it, so I’m just glad we were able to maintain what we did (in the first half). But we were very flat, and trying to figure out what was going on was difficult.”
Better, though, Coach Harmon realized, to win without your best than it is to lose.
“We’ve really just focused on passing throughout the field,” she said. ” Working on our transition, working on our transfers, working on passing even inside the circle. We had so many chances, and we didn’t capitalize. We were just a little off in our passing today, but we’re working on that and working as a unit together.”
For the most part this season, however, that passing game has been a staple of the Cougars’ ability to strike. It may not have been consistently there Tuesday, but it was there enough times to earn the two-goal victory.
“We’ve just been playing together so long, we know where each other is going to be,” Molly Harmon said. “We know the passes we need to make, so we give it and go from there. Most definitely it’s an (advantage). It works out in a lot of cases for us.”
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