Greenwald's Goal Gives Crimson Win in Double OT

Playing under the lights took on a whole new meeting Saturday night when the Harvard women’s soccer team faced off against Brown (4-8-0, 1-3-0) at Stevenson Field in Providence. A nearby lightning show and torrential downpour halted the action for over one hour before play resumed.

Between the weather and two overtime sessions, the seven o’clock game did not finish until nearly 11 o’clock, when freshman forward Jamie Greenwald’s golden goal gave the Crimson (6-4-2, 3-1-0 Ivy) the 1-0 win.

With 6:41 left in the second overtime, Greenwald took the ball at the top of the box and battled past the Bear defense. Off balance and under pressure, she knocked a shot off the goalpost and out of reach of extended goalkeeper Hillary Wilson.

“I shot for the low left hand corner, and it skipped,” Greenwald said. “It wasn’t even that pretty of a shot. The rain and everything contributed to it skidding in.”

But it was what Harvard needed, and it slid away with the double-overtime victory.

“Jamie really took it upon herself to do it,” said senior midfielder Alisha Moran. “She felt almost an obligation to put it away.”

Both teams had been scoreless for the first 82 minutes of play when the referee spotted lightning, forcing the teams to take a mandatory 30 minute hiatus.

It broke the Crimson’s momentum, as it had begun to dominate heavily before the rain set in.

“We were on top of them the whole game, especially the last five minutes before they delayed it because of the lightning,” Moran said.

With the first 30 minutes of waiting nearly complete, another flash of lightning held up play again. Harvard spent the time in an indoor track trying to stay active.

“Everyone was soaking wet,” Greenwald said. “We were trying to keep our moods high so we could go out with the same intensity we had before we were stopped.”

The Crimson’s main worry was that the weather would not let allow it to take the field again. The game had already gone more than the obligatory 75 minutes, so the scoreless tie would have stood as a completed game.

But Harvard, not to be robbed of its third Ivy win, came out even stronger when the storm blew over. Taking the field to the drumbeat of a few diehard Crimson fans, it battled for another 24 minutes before sealing the victory.

“We talked all season about giving your heart, and it just came out more than 100 percent in this game,” Greenwald said. “It was the biggest team effort that we’ve had all season.”

Harvard outshot Brown 29-12, as Wilson made 15 saves for the Bears. Behind the Crimson defense, junior goalkeeper Katie Shields recorded three stops.

Harvard’s fourth win in a row came on Brown’s home turf, where the Bears had not lost a game all season.

“We weren’t going to let this one get by us,” Moran said.

The Crimson returns to action on Saturday, when it travels to Princeton to do battle with the league-leading Tigers.

—Staff writer Carrie H. Petri can be reached at cpetri@fas.harvard.edu.