UNC vs UCLA women’s soccer national championship. Who won?

CARY

Fans stomped. The stadium shook.

UNC head coach Anson Dorrance, the only women’s soccer coach the Tar Heels have ever employed who built North Carolina into the peerless program that it is, checked the scoreboard. So did everyone else.

Twenty seconds. UNC 2, UCLA 1.

UCLA readied for a corner. Ally Lemos took a deep breath, swung her leg — and the ball floated and floated. A moshpit ensued. North Carolina goalie Emmie Allen got knocked to the grass. And above the rubble rose UCLA’s Reilyn Turner, whose head found the ball and snuck it right underneath the cross bar to tie it 2 all with 16 seconds on the clock.

The Bruins — 20 minutes of overtime later that featured a final, backbreaking goal in the 107th minute — high-stepped off the field with a 3-2 win.

Somehow, they’d just stunned Monday’s crowd of 9,531 in WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary (a neutral site in name only).

Somehow, they had completed one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the women’s College Cup.

Somehow, fueled by a belief that they said never wavered, they were national champions.

“Sixteen seconds to glory,” Dorrance told reporters after the game, reflecting on what could’ve been.

For so long on Monday night, this was North Carolina’s game to lose. The Tar Heels controlled the possession 63% to 37% in the first half and 54% to 46% for the game. They built a lead that felt unbreakable — a 59th-minute goal and a 75th-minute goal, both by virtue of crosses that found the head of UNC junior Avery Patterson.

And yet, three fated UCLA goals later, the Tar Heels had lost — hugging each other in teary disbelief, so close to delivering this program its first national championship since 2012.

Asked to explain her emotions after the game, Patterson said that she doesn’t think words could “explain this feeling.”

“We say to not play with regret, and I don’t think any of our girls did today, so I wouldn’t say that I have any regret right now,” she said. “I just feel horrible for our seniors. And just to be able to taste that national championship with 16 seconds left, it’s something that’s going to be hard to come back from.”

The UCLA goal that will live forever

Take away all the extra stakes of this game, and it still would’ve been great.

Take away the fact that the North Carolina women’s soccer program is one of the Top 5 winningest programs in the history of college sports. Take away the fact that Dorrance and UNC have won 21 national championships since 1982 — the dawn of the Division I NCAA-sanctioned sport — and one more title as a charter member of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women in 1981.

Take away the fact that Monday could’ve ended a 10-year national title drought for UNC, the longest of its kind by a mile.

Take away all the extra stakes UCLA brought to the table, too: the fact that UCLA’s Margueritte Aozasa became the first coach in NCAA women’s soccer history to win a national championship in her first year as a head coach; the fact that this was only UCLA’s second national title in six appearances; the fact, even, that UCLA was the team to deliver UNC its first loss of the 2022 season in September.

Take all that away, and you still have plenty of moments worthy of legend — and none more so than the UCLA goal that will be remembered forever.

When asked to dub the goal with a name, Aozasa laughed: “It’s like the heart-stopper or something.”

“It was incredible, I couldn’t really even see it to be honest,” the coach said. She added, “It’s funny or ironic that this year, I think … 60% of the goals we gave up were set pieces. And a few weeks ago, we really had to change our mentality about them, and we decided to be the aggressor, and that teams needed to be nervous when we had set pieces. And I told the team at halftime that we were going to get our chances. And we’re going to score a set piece tonight.

“I didn’t know it would be such a monumental set piece. But that one will go down in history. And like (my players) alluded to, that goal is just so emblematic of what this team is about.”

UNC’s Patterson did nearly everything right on Monday. She scored the team’s two goals; Dorrance called her “phenomenal.” And yet the junior forward, who played all 110 minutes on Monday night, will remember the end of regulation most, she said.

“I’m actually the one who conceded the corner kick,” she said, “so that’s something I’m gonna live with for a while.”

She added: “But the last 16 seconds, it’s all a blur. It was a good corner kick, but I thought it was over the bar at first, so I was just kind of watching it and watching it start to kind of go out of bounds, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is it.’ But then I think Emmie, our goalkeeper, was bodied by one of their girls.

“And I just…” her voice trailed off. “I have no idea. It’s something that I’m still kind of recovering from. Just the shock of it all.”

Dorrance reflected on the moment, too.

The goal was instantly controversial: The UCLA offense attacked the ball with a championship will and desperation and bulldozed the UNC goalie in the process, clearing a way for the score.

Per NCAA rules, reviews are only used (1) to determine whether the ball crossed the goal line; (2) to rectify a timing issue; (3) to identify players for disciplinary matters; and (4) to see if a player was fouled inside the 18-yard box. In other words, a foul can’t be assessed post-play.

“I wasn’t close enough, so I’m not going to speculate,” Dorrance said postgame. “I’ve DVR’ed this. I will be looking. But for right now, I can’t speculate. I was 70 yards away from whatever happened on that goal.”

Still, Dorrance reflected on the emotions of Monday and couldn’t help but be positive.

“This is one of the greatest finals I personally have ever been involved in,” said Dorrance, who has pretty much seen it all in women’s collegiate soccer. “Up and back. Lots of goals. Overtime, which obviously makes it more exciting. The drama of sport, you know? One team goes up, the other one claws their way back.

“There’s the inevitable controversy, which also makes it, you know, kind of fun. And then one team for a while is just on top of the world, and then all of a sudden, with 16 seconds, are absolutely devastated to have given up the lead.”

He added: “I think this game had all kinds of wonderful drama. And I think everyone who participated in it, from the players on both rosters, ought to be credited, because this was a wonderful sales pitch for the women’s collegiate soccer game.”

UNC-UCLA national championship goals

UNC scoring: Patterson (59th, 75th)

UCLA scoring: Lexi Wright (80th); Reilyn Turner (90th); Maricarmen Reyes (107th)

This story was originally published December 5, 2022 9:14 PM.