Maybe one of the lessons of this year is be very careful the game after you pull off a big upset.  On Friday, Pine Crest raised eyebrows all over the state when they traveled north to Vero Beach and came away with a stunning 11-8 victory.  Last night, Cypress Bay returned the feeling with a 48-minute effort for their biggest win in a long time. One of the great benefits of covering a game like this, with two teams that are not under consideration for Top 10 voting, is that you get to see players that are not getting the ‘big pub’ but are really terrific players.  And this game featured a number of them.  Some performed to expectation, some had a bit of an off-game and a couple really surprised the heck out of me.  It’s high school sports after all. And it made for a great game to watch.  Well, unless you were rooting for Pine Crest. But that’s also the problem with relatively young teams.  You just don’t know what you are going to get.  Makes coaches turn grey prematurely at times.  Coach Harris knows, he sensed before the game when talking to me that he wasn’t really sure how his team would react after the Vero win.  Nailed that one Coach. Due to injuries Cypress Bay is also fielding a very young team.  Coach Swinerton told me before the game he really felt this was going to be his best team, until the injuries set in.  Based on what I saw last night I only wish I could have seen his team healthy.  They played a heck of a game.  Jumped out early to a 6-1 lead before the end of the first half.  Pine Crest then stormed all the way back, tying it twice in the second half.  But Cypress Bay reached down for one more gear and found it with about two minutes left to win the game. I mentioned above about kids playing under the radar. Zach Smith, David Tescher, Patrick Haley . . . Tyler LoPorto, Ryan Morris, Kristopher Sanchez and Anthony Courcelie To the casual lacrosse fan down here maybe a name or two is familiar.  To a hard-core fan, some more are.  But there is no way anyone knows all of them.  I didn’t. My loss. Smith and Tescher played with some pretty big names the last couple of years.  Players now performing on the Division 1 stage.  Neither would look out of place on that stage themselves.  Haley played a pretty good game last night.  60% save percentage.  On a very tough field for a goalie to play.  Lots of funny bounces in front of the goal on the north end. And he was overshadowed in this one. Tyler LoPorto went 17/24, 71%, including 6 of 7 in the fourth quarter as PC pushed to finally take the lead.  Even while facing a 3-minute stick penalty in the period. And one save in particular I want to highlight because it will otherwise get lost in the shuffle.  I believe it was early in the second quarter and one of the PC players had dodged to the middle and gotten off a tricky bounce shot that was labeled for the upper right corner.  You saw it all the way and tracked it perfectly to make the save.  They should take that film clip and place it on YouTube with the heading ‘how to correctly watch the ball into your stick’.  It was perfect. I can’t say enough about Anthony Courcelie, except to say one thing your opponents will understand.  You remind me a lot of Michael Diener as a sophomore.  Good luck filling those shoes.  But if you do . . . Ryan Morris and Kristopher Sanchez – gutty performances.  5G/3A between the two of you. And let’s not forget Nick Countryman and Jack Mutschler, who saved their best for last, with the game winner at 2:13 on their only points of the night. Sure there were a lot of turnovers but as I’ve written a number of times before, a game can still be very exciting to watch with them. Cypress Bay came out with an intensity while Pine Crest looked like they were a little flat.  CB took advantage at the 7:03 mark of the first as Morris scored unassisted.  He picked up a pass near midfield after a turnover and scooted down the right side and when he got into scoring position spun to his left hand and fired a low shot to the short side of Haley for the 1-0 lead.  PC tied the game at 5:18 as Eddie Soto scored, dodging from the left wing to the middle of the field and placing his right-hand shot in the upper right corner for 1-1.  Sanchez put CB back ahead just 22 seconds later, making a nifty catch from Morris’ right wing feed, and shooting low for 2-1.  CB stretched it out further to 3-1 at 4:34 as Dylan Pultano scored unassisted, running down the right wing, spinning off his defender and hitting the high, far side to end the period. CB continued the run in the second with 3 straight goals to go up 6-1.  At 8:57, on a 6 on 4 EMO, Ryan Dugan took a feed in the middle of the defense from up top from Will Welch and scored into the upper right corner of the net.  At 8:35, on the remaining 6 on 5 EMO, Morris scored his second, from Sanchez, as was fed to the right crease from the right wing, shooting left-handed and low.  Then at 3:18 Sanchez took Morris’ high right side feed on the wing while cutting towards goal and fired a high laser and it was 6-1.  PC started to fight back just 44 seconds later, Marc Woolf unassisted, as he picked up a loose ball during a scramble in the middle and bounced a right-hand shot past LoPorto and the teams went to halftime with CB leading 6-2.  The lead was partly a combo of PC playing short-handed in the 2nd and the face-off success of CB and their ability to capitalize on both. Both of those flipped in the third quarter and it led to PC’s comeback in that quarter as they outscored CB 4-0 to tie the game after three.  At 10:10, on a 5 on 5, Tescher scored unassisted off a spin dodge from the left wing, splitting two defenders and scoring right-handed on the short side.  Then at 7:08 the lead was cut to 2 as Smith scored unassisted as he worked his way from the left wing to the front of the cage before going low.  Jon Farchi continued the run 49 seconds later, drawing a penalty on top to make it 6-5.  Farchi curled from behind the net to the left of the goal and placed it low, far side and the game was on.  Then just another 33 seconds later PC completed the run on Matt Urban’s goal, off Smith’s feed to make it 6-6.  Smith, from the left wing, found Urban all alone on the right crease and Urban finished on the EMO and we had a new game going into the fourth. CB answered just 11 seconds into the fourth to regain the lead 7-6.  Sanchez picked up the faceoff, sprinted straight through the middle of the feed and placed a shot between Haley’s legs.  PC was able to tie it again at 7-7, taking advantage of another 5 on 5, at 7:58, as Tescher scored unassisted as he shot a laser of his own after cutting to the middle from the left wing, setting up the exciting last few minutes.  After killing off the remainder of the 3-minute stick penalty CB was able to set up the winning play and with 2:13 left Countryman took Mutschler’s left goal line extended pass in the middle and was able to get off a right-hand shot low the left side that found net.  The rest of the game CB defended frantically, as PC had good looks to tie the game but LoPorto came up big, including one final stop after a defensive zone turnover in the last seconds that could have proven fatal, and CB stormed their goalie after the game horn sounded. As they should have. In retrospect, Pine Crest will lament how slowly they started the game, giving CB the chance to gain both momentum and confidence.  One other thing they will likely regret is the lack of assisted goals.  Having watched them pre-season, early in the season and now late, they are a better team when they play off each other some more and they clearly got away from that this game.  But that is also a function of a young team. A team that will now need to dig down deep as their last three games include road trips to Pope John Paul II, Spanish River and Saint Andrew’s to finish the season.  They will need to step up to their Vero level for those games. For Cypress Bay, a great way to build on for the playoff run coming up.  And a nice win for Coach Swinerton who has to live with the youth of the team he put on the field tonight.  That job got a little easier last night.  An interesting match-up against University School looms. Each school is favored to get through Districts and I’ll be following them to see how they fare in the brackets.  Good luck to both of them the rest of the season.   Team Statistics   Faceoffs:  CB 12 – PC 6 Shots:  PC 36 – CB 35 Shots on Goal:  PC 24 – CB 20 Turnovers:  CB 28 – PC 22 Penalties:  CB 9 – PC 8   Individual Statistics   CB Ryan Morris  2G/2A Kristopher Sanchez  3G/1A Dylan Pultano, Ryan Dugan and Nick Countryman  1G each Will Welch and Jack Mutschler  1A each   PC David Tescher  2G Zach Smith  1G/1A Marc Woolf, Eddie Soto, Jon Farchi and Matt Urban  1G each   Tyler LoPorto with 17 saves and Patrick Haley with 12 saves   Thanks to Coaches Harris and Swinerton for talking to me both before and after the game. And hi to Mikey and Laura – who will be on our weekly podcast this week to discuss Pocket and Sockets! One last shout out to the two young men who webcast the game last night.  Such a neat thing for high school kids to be able to do thanks to PC’s commitment to their broadcasting program!  If either of you have a serious interest in making broadcasting a career let me know and i’ll introduce you to Wells at ESPN760 so you can ask him how to best go about becoming one.  Just remember one thing, it’s okay to take a breath once in awhile.  But you did a nice job last night! We’ll add pictures to this article as we get them in.