Alex Bono kept repeating the same phrase in his head.

“Don’t take him down. Don’t take him down. Don’t take him down.”

But Bono watched helplessly as Skylar Thomas brought Jon Gallagher down hard to the ground in the 74th minute after he got past him in the defensive third. Thomas was given a red card and ejected from the game, and four seconds later, Notre Dame netted the first and only goal of the match.

Brandon Aubrey, who had just headed the ball in off a pass from Patrick Hodan, rushed up the field to meet his teammates as Bono stood motionless in the goal.

“To give up a set piece on the ensuing play is disappointing for us,” Bono said. “Set pieces are something we take pride in defending and attacking. That is a real knock on what we believe in.”

The Notre Dame score happened amid a flurry of chances on the offensive end for No. 20 Syracuse (4-1, 0-1 Atlantic Coast), which allowed its first goal of the season in a 1-0 loss to No. 4 Notre Dame (3-1-1, 1-0) in front of a record SU Soccer Stadium crowd of 2,442. The Orange outshot Notre Dame 13-12 and had 15 corner kicks to UND’s four.

But in the end it was one sequence of plays, one four-second span, that flipped the narrative of the game. For much of the first 73 minutes SU seemed poised to score and win its first game against Notre Dame since 1997. Instead Syracuse was left hanging its heads instead of celebrating possibly the biggest regular-season win in its history.

“That’s the beauty of our game, the emotions. The highs and lows,” head coach Ian McIntyre said. “That’s why you have 2,500 people here. That’s the beauty of our sport.”

Much of the game was defined by Syracuse’s potent yet ineffective offense. The Orange, utilizing its 3-5-2 formation, controlled possession for long stretches of time.

Oyvind Alseth had a strike from over 20 yards out that hit off the crossbar in the 69th minute. Julian Buescher had a shot that was grabbed by UND goalie Patrick Wall, as he dove to his left to keep the game scoreless. Seconds after that, Alex Halis kicked a ball to the middle that scooted past Emil Ekblom and out of bounds.

The crowd moaned, but Syracuse had Notre Dame on its heels. Against a team that had beaten Syracuse 3-0 on the same turf a year ago, in front of the same packed stadium with a lot of the same players on the field, Syracuse was not the same team.

“It’s tough to say you’re delighted when you’re upset, when you haven’t taken anything away from this game,” McIntyre said. “Ultimately, we’re going to be evaluated by how we do in the ACC against the best teams in the country.

McIntyre said that Saturday’s loss to Notre Dame felt different than ones in the past. He said that he used to go into games against the best opponents just trying to “hang in there” or “mess them up a little bit.”

After the game, Syracuse spoke in the rhetoric of a team that came oh-so-close. It spoke like a team wanting to forget that it missed the chance to beat a Top-10 team for the first time in 13 years.

“We’ve got to look past it,” Halis said.

“They just came out on top,” senior midfielder Nick Perea said.

“We take a lot of progress from this one,” Bono said.

“Unfortunately tonight,” McIntyre said, “they came away with another win here.”

Published on September 13, 2014 at 11:17 pm

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3