The chance was staring the Syracuse men’s soccer team square in the face. The opportunity to play spoiler for a longtime rival was there for the taking.

Instead, St. John’s tightened the stranglehold on Syracuse that it has built up over the last decade and a half.

‘We just wanted to have fun, and that’s exactly what we did,’ senior midfielder Kenny Caceros said. ‘We thought about the whole spoiling thing, but really it just came down to us having fun.’

With Syracuse’s 2-0 loss to St. John’s Sunday night at SU Soccer Stadium, the Orange’s winless streak against the Red Storm extended to 12 matches. Syracuse has not beaten St. John’s since 1996.

Syracuse (3-15, 2-9 Big East) had numerous incentives to beat St. John’s for the first time in more than a decade. Coming into Sunday’s game, the Red Storm sat in third place in the Red Division of the Big East.

St. John’s had already secured a spot in the Big East tournament, and had not lost a game in its last nine contests, accumulating a 4-0-5 record in that span. A win over Syracuse would vault St. John’s into second place in the Red Division and secure a first-round bye for the Red Storm in the conference tournament.

Although the game was important for St. John’s postseason, Syracuse had no conference tournament in its future. All it had was its last regular season game and the chance to make the Red Storm’s life a little more difficult.

‘That was obviously the goal, because them coming back here to play us to see if they could get that bye in the first round, which now they’ll have,’ senior co-captain Pete Hill said. ‘We just came out here like it was any other game, just trying to knock them off and have a little fun out here for our last time together.’

Saturday’s game against Cincinnati certainly provided Syracuse with plenty of momentum to accomplish its goal. The Orange recorded a rare come-from-behind victory over the Bearcats, 3-1, Saturday night.

But despite the belief that the momentum was there, Syracuse simply could not duplicate the results.

‘Even though we lost, you saw the performance was great,’ Caceros said. ‘We definitely took some momentum from yesterday.’

In a perhaps ironic twist of fate, the contest against Cincinnati should have been Syracuse’s last game of the season. But a consistent downpour Wednesday made the field unplayable and postponed the St. John’s game until Sunday night.

‘We would have liked to have won Wednesday and end on this,’ senior captain Hansen Woodruff said after Saturday night’s victory over Cincinnati. ‘But things can’t always go the way you want it to.’

That latter statement by Woodruff has been the theme of the Syracuse-St. John’s rivalry over the past several years, at least from Syracuse’s perspective.

So Sunday night’s match provided Syracuse a chance for revenge, a chance to throw a monkey wrench into the season of a rival that has kept the heel of its boot on the Orange’s throat for the last 13 years.

But even the thrill of a rare victory on the previous night could not give the Orange enough energy to wrestle the monkey off of its back.

‘We know how to win now,’ senior forward Tom Perevegyencev said after the win over Cincinnati. ‘So we’re going to try to win again.’

Despite Syracuse’s best efforts, St. John’s will now get its bye in the first round. But the players chose to take away the best parts of the final game of the season.

‘I’m really proud of all the guys,’ Hill said. ‘That’s one of the best teams in the country, one of the best teams in the conference, and we gave it our all, last night out. Young guys, seniors, everybody gave a great effort, so that all we cold really ask for.’

azmeola@syr.edu

Published on November 1, 2009 at 12:00 pm