Sun rising in the east, I am excited because today is the day. Game day against, a beatable team, Hutchinson. We have never beat them in our entire existence as a soccer team. Today is the day, we are finally going to beat them.

School goes on as normal, just putting the excitement down for now. It’s fan night, the whole team shows up early to watch the girls game and talk about how we are going to play and what we have to accomplish to get the win tonight. We stand at the gate with 20 minutes left in the girls game, greeting fans.

Then Hopke yells, “Let’s go, warm-up!” and it’s on, everyone's in their pre-game do not talk to me mood. Going through stretches like always, knee pulls, quad pulls, frankenstein, junkies, calves...etc.

With the end of the girls game, we walk onto the field with 20 minutes to finish our warm-up. Playing our usual possession game, until there is ten minutes left in warm-ups. Then we transition into three on two, to warm-up Kottke, and give the forwards a chance to shoot the ball. I see someone on the other team, Sawyer Fratzke, and a memory comes back.

“S-P-E-E-D, what does that spell?” Lee questions. “SPEED!” the team yells back. We are conditioning, and Sawyer is lying on the ice coughing, almost puking, one more. Skating a Herbie, named after the great coach Herb Brooks.

It has been almost a year since I have seen him, and he looks like he has lost about 30+ pounds, and grew three inches. Back to the focusing on the game, we are now in a group talking about who is starting who isn’t, luckily I am starting at left back. The announcements are going on for who is starting on the other team, and Sawyer is.

Hopke’s final statement before we start the game, “From this point forward it’s up to you to win.” This sets the mood with everyone we start the game hot, good passing, good touches, playing like a team we haven’t seen this year. Playing out of our minds, playing like this we could keep up with Mankato West, who beat us 8-0 earlier this season. Completing passes that Aston Villa would be completing, possessing the game the best we have witnessed.

We scored first off of Adam Rahn’s foot getting us all hyped up and excited to see the result of our valiant efforts. Keeping up the pressure, and controlling the pace of the game, the team is dominant.

All of a sudden the game switches and we are on the defensive and Hutchinson is threatening a goal, they miss by inches two or three times in a row, without us being able to get the ball out of our own half. Getting scared that they are going to tie the game, Hopke makes some changes, pulling Jason, and the two forwards off. Now it is Jeremy, Eric, and me in the backfield.

The game goes back neutral back and forth and back again. We score again, this time it is Chris, he beat three defenders and the goalie on a beautiful goal. The momentum is back in our favor, there is only one minute left in the half, and most of it is spent in our control.

The halftime speech from Hopke consists of him congratulating us on how well we played in the first and that we need to replicate that in the second to give us the best chance of winning. Chris is telling us that we had a few minor errors certain times, when we were being dominated, for about ten minutes of the first half and that if we correct them we should not have a problem winning this game.

The second starts, we do not have the ball of the start as we started the game with it, Hutch does well in controlling play for the first five or so minutes and then we get a consistent amount of pressure though it resulted in no goals we were controlling the game for five minutes, then Hutch comes storming down the field like a grenade just went off behind them and they are flooding and overwhelming our defense with pressure we were not ready for. They get a penalty kick, thus far Kottke is 100% on penalty kicks this year, stopping 1/1 and amazingly he stops this second one as well and remains at 100%.

20 minutes left in the game we are still up two nil, we are mounting an attack and we take three corners in a row, and Eric, puts two of them just over the net. We keep the pressure up and end up scoring what we believe the be the clincher.

With two minutes left in the game we have this securely in the bag and we are just playing with them at this point playing the ball out of bounds every time we get the chance just to burn time off of the clock. We win the game with the final score of three to nothing.

The post game speech Hopke tells us that we won that game because we played faster and a lot better than we have in the past and that we played to our full potential. That ends his speech.

Arriving at home, feeling as though a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders, knowing that we beat a team that has given us nothing but troubles, in the six years we have had a program. Falling asleep was easy that night. I never will forget how it feels to get this ‘monkey’ off my back. Remembering that speed is the reason we were able to complete this task.