Evanston’s field hockey team appeared headed for one of those frustrating losses Thursday night at the Lakeside Field on the Northwestern University campus.
You know, one of those games where you dominate the time of possession — and the other team scores on its only shot on goal and pulls out a 1-0 victory.
But Allison Lemmon wouldn’t let it happen.
The ETHS sophomore scored her first goal of the season with just 35 seconds left in the first half, then added two more in the second half of a 4-1 trimming of Naperville North in Evanston’s last home game of the season.
Lemmon’s first career hat trick pushed the Wildkit winning streak to 3 in a row. Now 4-1 overall, the Kits turned in what first-year head coach Jenner Johnson called “our best game of the season.”
Naperville North scored in the first 5 minutes of the contest on a shot by Jessica Van Rossum, making the Huskies just the second team to score on the Kit defense this season along with New Trier.
But there was no panic on the Wildkit sidelines.
“We had it in our attacking 25 (yards) the whole first half, and once we got that first goal I felt like we controlled the rest of the game,” said Johnson. “I knew we were going to score. I thought this was our best game of the year because we were able to come from behind and for the way we kept our heads up even when we were down 1-0.
“We really stepped up, we hustled and we beat them to the ball tonight. Our ball possession was much better tonight because we had confidence over the ball. We’ve been working on keeping possession, and with that comes confidence.”
That kind of confidence allowed the winners to possess the ball at least 90 percent of the time in the first half. But even though they created 5 corner restarts, they couldn’t put a shot past North goalie Catherine Fleming until Lemmon’s laser shot from 15 yards out in the final minute of the half.
Lemmon, who also had a goal disallowed in the first half, continued her hot streak with two more tallies in the second half and Josie Lambert put in a rebound attempt to nail down the victory.