Courtesy of the Record Eagle.

BUCKLEY — Buckley is back in the district finals.

The Bears staved off a valiant North Bay comeback effort for a 2-1 win in Monday’s Division 4 soccer district semifinal at Buckley.

All the scoring happened in the first 20 minutes. Then it was all defense, with Buckley’s back line of Cooper Rath, Lorenzo Tognetti, Ryan Deshasier and Jake Romzek kept most of the action away from goaltender Josh Barley to keep North Bay at bay.

Rath, the squad’s lone captain until the team voted to add Italian foreign-exchange student Tognetti as a second, said getting back to the district final for the first time in three years was a big goal for this team.

“I was on the last district final team, and I was a freshman,” Rath said. “So I have not seen it. I watched all those 2017 games all those boys are very close friends. This is reliving their glory, basically. It’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever had as a soccer player.”

The Bears (15-4-1) lost to Leland prior to the district final each of the last two seasons, 1-0 in overtime last year and 7-0 in 2019. They fell to McBain Northern Michigan Christian in the 2018 final by a 1-0 count, and get another shot at Leland in Thursday’s district championship tilt.

“I’m just really hoping to play together as a team and bring home a district trophy for Buckley,” Rath said. “This is huge for our community. I’ve got little brothers on the junior high team, and my mom always tells me ‘They look up to you’ every day, and those boys, their whole team was here watching us play, and they want it just as bad as we do.”

Tognetti said the community embraced him from the start, and was honored they selected him as a captain two months after arriving in the United States, starting his time here after the Bears already played several games.

“That was kind of unexpected because I didn’t expect to be a captain here,” Tognetti said. “Since the first day that I was here, they treated me like family. That counts for me and for (Alfonso Jimenez), who is from Spain.”

Where the district final gets played is up for debate. A trip to district host Harbor Springs is more than an hour and a half for Buckley and over two hours for Leland — two towns less than an hour drive apart.

Traverse City is almost right in the middle, but Leland gets to host even though Buckley is the top seed. Large districts such as this one revert to geographic rules, where the bracket’s top line hosts rather than the higher seed.

Buckley leading scorer, Jimenez, hasn’t been quite the same since an ankle injury against Leland nine days prior, but the Bears get another shot at the Comets (9-13-1) in the district final Thursday after Leland’s 4-1 win at Glen Lake. Jimenez spent much of the time in between the Leland and North Bay games on crutches after the ankle swelled up.

Still, he rung up the game-winning goal as all of the contest’s scoring came in the first 20 minutes.

Luke Frasier scored first off a Connor Dunn assist. North Bay quickly answered with sophomore Finn Mankowski’s unassisted goal.

Alfonso scored off a Frasier throw-in for the game’s final goal with over 60 minutes remaining.

In between, the teams played fairly evenly, demonstrated by the goalie numbers. Buckley’s Josh Barley put up three saves, and North Bay’s Sam Vukasovich made four.

“Josh Barley is the best keeper we’ve had since Joey Weber, whose number we retired,” Buckley head coach John Vermilya said. “He hasn’t surpassed Joey. Make sure Joey knows that. Joey is always in our hearts. But Josh has improved so much and he in the back four really got it done for us.”

Dunn also blocked North Bay’s final shot in the waning seconds off the foot of Mankowski, coming back in the game after Tyler Milarch was sent off with a yellow card with 15 seconds left.

“They’ve improved so much,” Vermilya said. “(North Bay coach) Tony Mosqueda has done such a good job there. And I feel like a grandpa. Well, I am a grandpa, but I coached against him when he was a kid. Now he’s a coach on the other side. And I know he was at Leland and we’re supposed to hate those guys because of the rivalry with the Bears, but I’m just so proud of him because he’s classy and he’s done a great job there.”

North Bay (7-12-1) loses six seniors, but returns a good deal of talent in its younger classes.

“We had a good senior class, but looking down the line, we’ve got a strong junior class and sophomore, freshman class as well,” Mosqueda said. “Coach Len (Mankowski) and I, we can only do so much. We can motivate them all we want to but unless they want it, it’s not going to happen. It was really nice for us to get the halfway season mark, and then they just wanted it. And every game they got better and better, not just against Buckley, but every opponent they played, improvement every time.”

North Bay finished 6-6 in its last 12 games, a big improvement from a 1-6 start. The team also played every Northwest Conference game closer the second time through that the first, even turning a 3-1 loss to Benzie Central the first matchup into a 3-0 win the second time around.

The Bears beat North Bay 6-2 in their first meeting Sept. 13, then took a much closer 2-0 decision Sept. 29. This time was even closer.

“We’ve tried to play less boom ball,” Rath said. “We’ve tried to play more together instead of just a one-man show. And North Bay has gotten exceptionally better since we played them the first time.”