Oct 27, 2020 4 min read

CANONSBURG-There will be a new WPIAL champion in Class 4A.

Seventh-seeded Canon-McMillan’s season ended in dramatic, but disheartening fashion Tuesday night in Canonsburg. The Big Macs (7-5-1) fell to No. 10 Butler (11-5-1) 2-1 in penalty kicks.

Canon-Mac didn’t get a lot done against Tornados’ goalkeeper Carson Stein at any point, and PK’s were no exception. Stein saved three of four penalties, including the last kick of the game, and Butler outscored the Big Macs 3-1 in the penalty round.

“We’d been practicing (penalty situations) for a week or so, but you never know,” Butler coach Troy Mohney said. “When you get into a pressure situation like that, you never know how they’re going to respond to those situations. Luckily, our goalie was on fire.”

Unfortunately, for the home team, Stein was indeed on fire. Freshman Cody Lubinsky also rose to the occasion for Butler, scoring the eventual winning goal on Butler’s fourth shot. Stein saved the ensuing kick to seal the deal.

For Canon-Mac head coach Larry Fingers, the penalty disappointment wasn’t for lack of readiness.

“I think we were pretty prepared,” he said. “I mean we do it every day in training. Things happen. The pressure’s on. The ball changes trajectory… It happens sometimes.”

For a little more than 20 minutes, it didn’t look like the game would come to penalties, or the 30th minutes of overtime that proceeded them. In the 47th minute, Big Macs’ defender Owen Maher nailed a free kick from just outside the 18-yard box, giving Canon-Mac a 1-0 lead.

With a little more than 12 minutes to play, Butler had an answer. This time, it was off a corner kick that Tyler Gillis cashed in to make it 1-1.

Butler had a few opportunities to bury the Big Mac’s over the next 42 minutes of play, but neither team could score, and penalties were needed.

The coach’s son, Landon Mohney, scored on the first kick to put the Golden Tornados ahead. On Canon-Mac’s first PK, Stein stopped Mohney to keep it at 1-0. Butler’s next shot, by Jaxon Llewellyn, hit the post, and Stein made his second save to keep it at 1-0. After Evan Fetter made it 2-0, a goal by Canon-Mac’s Mason Li gave the Big Macs their only highlight of penalty kicks, and ultimately was the last highlight of their 2020 season. Stein stopped Kaiden Reamer to seal the deal.

To keep its season alive, Butler will have to pull another upset, when it takes on second-seed Seneca Valley – also from Section 1- Saturday afternoon. The Golden Tornados split the regular season series with the Warriors, with a 2-1 win Sept. 24.{/span}

“We know each other really well,” Mohney said. “So we’ll see who can execute a little bit better.”

For Canon-Mac, this marks the end of, among other adjectives, a tumultuous season. In pre-COVID 19 society, it would have been hard enough to live up to last year’s WPIAL championship campaign, and doing so while having to replace three all-district performers compounded the challenge. The pandemic, of course, created a whole new set of problems. And though the season ended in disappointment, Fingers sees some positives to take away from 2020.

“We’re just grateful we got to play,” he said. “After winning the WPIAL’s last year, we replaced a lot of players. We had a lot of inexperienced guys. I thought they did great and stepped up to the challenge.

Canon-Mac knows all about winning, with three WPIAL championships in eight years. For Fingers, the main goal for 2021 and beyond will be to get in the hunt, and see what happens from there.

_”We always want to be in the conversation,” Fingers said. “I think we’ve done well as a program over the years, and we’re always in the conversation. We’re always in games, all that stuff. We’ll lose some good seniors this year, but return a good core as well. So we’ll see how it develops over the year. “