Dancing With The Devils: Marquette 18, Arizona State 17 (OT)

The Golden Eagles had to endure ties and lead changes and runs of goals for longer than 60 minutes on Tuesday, but came out with a win thanks to Hanna Bodner.

It was a wild one in the Valley on Tuesday afternoon, and befitting a wild one, it took more than a regulation 60 minutes to decide the outcome between Arizona State and YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles. Four stretches of at least four goals in a row, two for each team, eight ties, five lead changes, and regarding those last two items, it was the last one of each that ultimately decided the game.

First, it was Hanna Bodner tying the thing up at 17 with 55 seconds left in regulation, coming out of a timeout dialed up by head coach Meredith Black. Bodner got the ball up top, took a bounce to unsteady her defender, and then just drove right past her to the right side of the cage to score. That was the 34th goal of the game, and it still left enough time for someone to win it in regulation. Given the way things had gone for Marquette on draws to that point — Arizona State had the edge, 23-13, and that was after a first half that went 18-4 against MU — it didn’t seem like a great opportunity for Marquette. It wasn’t, the Sun Devils got the ball, Lorelai Van Guilder ended up with a green card to send MU down a woman for the rest of regulation………… and Sofia Santana just poked it away to end the Sun Devil threat and get the game to overtime.

The problem, of course, is that the green card hadn’t expired, so ASU just got to start overtime with the ball. Guess who came up with the play? You betcha, Sofia Santana again, this time standing her ground in front of the charging Arizona State attacker to draw the charge. Quick restart, Mary Velner took a loooooong look at the net in transition as she brought the ball into the attacking zone before passing it off and MU set up their offense. Tess Osburn missed the cage on a free position attempt, but MU had it backed up and reset. CJ Meehan drove and fired, missed, but backed up again.

I’m building drama, can you tell?

Second verse, same as the first: Hanna Bodner got it up top, hop step, went past her defender, and ripped a shot to the left top 90 for the OT game winner.

That goal marked the cap to an eight goal, nine point day for Bodner, both of which are career bests for the senior from Pennsylvania, besting the five goal day she had against Detroit Mercy nine days earlier and the five point day that she’s had twice this season including that UDM game. Bodner’s career outing was more than welcome in this barn burner of a game, because of all of the things that were going right for Marquette, one of the things that was not was the offensive attack of Meg Bireley, MU’s all time leading scorer. Arizona State held her without a shot at all until a little bit into the second half. Bireley finished with one goal on five shots, but as you can tell from the final score, her teammates stepped up in a big way as the Sun Devils focused on getting Bireley’s abilities out of the game.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m skipping over recapping the rest of the game. The whole thing was swinging too wildly back and forth to really make it have a point to say “oh, this happened, and then this happened,” and so on and so forth. You got the idea from the check down of ties and lead changes and runs.

The one thing that I do want to point out is that while the 17 goals allowed don’t obviously tell you this was the case, I think this was a tremendous performance from Marquette’s defensive unit, especially goalie Brynna Nixon. First: Marquette didn’t let Arizona State get much in the way of free position attempts in the game, and they went just 1-for-4 on those. All four came in the first half, and Nixon came up with the save on the other three. As the game swung from Marquette up 4-1 to Arizona State up 7-5, to tied at 8, to Sun Devils up 11-10 at halftime, those three saves from Nixon — not to mention her other four stops — were incredibly valuable for the Golden Eagles.

The value was multiplied by that draw control problem that Marquette had through the entire game, but especially in the first half. 11-10 Arizona State on the scoreboard at halftime, but the Sun Devils were the ones with the ball after 16 of those 21 goals because of their dominance on draws. It was a hell of a thing for Marquette to be down just one when ASU was taking the ball after their own goals so many times, but that goes back to the MU defensive performance as a whole. 10 of ASU’s 14 turnovers in the game go in the book as caused by Marquette, including a game high three from Lily Dietrich. A lot of goals went in, yeah, but MU had to make a lot of plays to balance out the game going the other way against them in places, and the defense did enough to give the offense a chance to win, including coming up with the key turnovers late in regulation and right away in overtime.

How about some highlights, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and FloSports?

Up Next: Marquette will be back in action in the Valley seasonal bubble this coming Saturday, as they pick up the back half of a doubleheader with the men’s team. After Jake Richard’s squad hosts St. John’s at 11am, Meredith Black’s team will host Xavier with the start time set for 2pm Central. If you’re planning on coming out for just the women’s game, be prepared for a bit of congestion relative to the capacity in the Valley bubble and that men’s game starting 3 hours earlier. As for the Musketeers, they dropped to 1-8 overall on the year when they lost their Big East opener to Denver last Sunday by a score of 18-2.