East Aurora assistant coach James Ross barked at his team: “If we keep this up, we’re going to finish like this!”
The Tomcats trailed by two goals at Romeoville on Wednesday afternoon and weren’t showing any sign that they had a rally in them. But then it happened.
Moments after Ross hollered, Sergio Reyes Jr. scored and the Tomcats then followed with the game-tying and winning goals in the final few minutes to stun the Spartans 3-2.
“I was really proud with how the guys played,” Tomcats coach Nathan Parry said. “We could’ve made excuses. We tied (Tuesday night’s) conference game against West Chicago and could’ve easily just hoped for the clock to hurry up since this wasn’t a conference game, but they kept working hard and then scored three unanswered goals.”
Parry’s message at halftime was clear: “Don’t give up.”
“That’s what I told the kids,” he said. “I told them we’ve got a lot of game left and to keep playing hard.”
Romeoville (4-3-1) scored on a penalty kick in the opening minute and added an insurance goal from Yael Perreda with 33:07 remaining to jump ahead 2-0.
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East Aurora (4-2-1) split its deficit in half when Reyes scored on a rebound with 27:56 remaining. Minutes earlier, it appeared Reyes found the back of the net but the goal was nullified due to the Tomcats being offsides.
“When that happens you just have to fight through it,” he said. “I went back and fought to get that first one and that’s when we started to play better.”
Reyes used a header to tie the game at 2-2, taking a 25-yard cross from Edgar Esquivel with 3:33 left.
“I can barely remember that second goal,” Reyes said. “It was an exciting moment to get the header and tie the game, but we still knew there was time left so we didn’t want to just settle for a tie.”
It was quite the turnaround for the Tomcats. They weren’t finished, as Jose Alonso sent a perfectly executed cross to Alex Arevalo, who sent it in just inside the opposite post for the victory.
“I was just looking for a chance with so little time left,” Arevalo said. “I just needed to get it and shoot it. To be down 2-0 and come back like that was big and not just to tie the game, but to score the winning goal.”
The three goals by the Tomcats were all highlight worthy, but apparently no one recorded them via video.
“I told the guys that I wish we had someone filming this game so we could watch those goals again,” Parry said. “That’s too bad. One of the things that’s going to be nice about our new stadium is we’re putting in a camera so at our first home game we’ll have that.”
C.R. Walker is a freelance writer for The Beacon-News.