After Marquette fell behind 2-0 in the regular season meeting with Xavier and then got completely shutdown by the Musketeers’ defense in the second half of that game, it very much seemed like Marquette’s best pathway through Wednesday’s Big East semifinal game was going to be trying to scoreless draw their way through two overtime sessions into penalty kicks and then crossing some fingers.
I wasn’t wrong.
Marquette did a heck of job suffocating the game in the first half, outshooting Xavier 3-1 as
neither team managed a shot on goal officially. The second half started wobbling away from Marquette as the Musketeers ended up outshooting the Golden Eagles 12-5 after intermission, but the game went past the 75 minute mark still locked up without a goal.
And then Taylor Thomas hauled in this ball after a Marquette corner kick — not officially a save, by the way — and well, this is a hell of an outlet pass to Regan Dancer, isn’t it?
Heck, all due respect to Regan Dancer, but is that the best first touch of her entire career? It has to be up there, right? No fault to Mia Hurd on the challenge, Dancer just beat her, and Hurd was unlucky to not disturb the ball as it went past her.
That was in the 76th minute of the game, and things looked very not okay for Marquette given the entirety of what was going on. But MU was doing a pretty good job generating corner kick chances, and in the 80th minute, Kaylie Sheehan paid off on one of MU’s six corner kicks of the season.
Just cleaning up the mess in a scramble after the corner, but when the defense can’t clear it, you have to make the best of your situations and that’s what Sheehan did.
And so, that forced overtime. The two 10 minute extra sessions were a little bit on the slow side, especially the back end of the second one when it kind of felt like no one wanted to take a chance with penalty kicks rapidly approaching. That’s where we ended up, and when Mia Hurd leapt and stopped Brooklynn Miltenberger’s shot to start the fourth round, man, they had me. Emily Fix scored for Marquette to make it 4-3 Golden Eagles, and I could taste Saturday’s title game in the air.
Taylor Thomas stopped Haley Christianson after XU got their fourth conversion to start the fifth round, and with the mandatory rounds done with a 4-4 tie, it was time for sudden victory. Breanna Dardano converted on Xavier’s turn in the sixth round, and then it was Clare Shea’s turn for Marquette.
Shouts to Xavier for putting up the shootout winning save, that’s very helpful for storytelling purposes if not actually very fun to watch. No shade to Shea for getting stopped, Marquette had 110 minutes of soccer to do something about not even letting it get to her shooting to keep the shootout running, and ultimately, they couldn’t find a way to do that.
Highlights, such as they are, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and ESPN+:
Up Next: Preparing for the spring exhibition season, because Marquette’s season is over. The Golden Eagles have finished the season with a record of 7-3-10, and since they started the day at #83 in the RPI with five Quadrant 4 draws and three more in Quadrant 3… yeah, that’s not impressing anyone into giving the Golden Eagles an NCAA tournament at-large berth. That’s a bummer, but 2026 was clearly head coach Chris Allen’s best season out of his three in charge at Marquette. Onwards and upwards from here, hopefully…..
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