Boys Soccer: Schwartz earns Conestoga a little revenge on Central Bucks East

TREDYFFRIN >> When Logan Schwartz checked in for the final time with 17 minutes to play Saturday, and again when Mason Miller entered with 10 left, the message from Conestoga coach David Zimmerman was succinct: Closing time.

“The mentality is really just to keep up the pressure,” Miller said. “We know that there’s only a few minutes left in the game, and if we didn’t do anything, it would go to overtime. We just wanted to get a goal, put it away early and finish the game off.”

As the last wave in Zimmerman’s 20-man rotation plan, Miller and Schwartz delivered, the latter hammering home a beautifully taken goal in the 76th minute to see the top-seeded Pioneers over No. 9 Central Bucks East in a District 1 Class 4A quarterfinal grudge match.

Schwartz took Zimmerman’s “closing time” mantra to heart, and so Conestoga’s new beginning (and a fifth PIAA tournament berth in seven seasons) came from Central Bucks East’s beginning’s end.

There’s no love lost between two of the most successful teams around, a tantalizing matchup that popped off the page as soon as brackets were released. These teams decided the District 1 (then Class AAA) title last year and met in the PIAA semis, the Patriots winning both en route to a state crown and inflicting the only blemishes on Conestoga’s 2015 record. Some faces have changed, and Conestoga (20-0) is now the side lavished with national attention, but emotions were still rubbed raw Saturday.

“We got kicked out by them last year, and we needed to come back this year against them,” Conestoga defender Mike McCarthy said. “… It was definitely in the back of our minds.”

“I was a part of that, and I remember that we were their only two losses last year,” C.B. East defender Stephen Sheehan said. “If it wasn’t for us, they would’ve done what we did. And we knew coming in that they were going to want revenge. And we could tell out there, they knew who we were and what they wanted to do.”

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