Waterville standout Lydia Roy sailed an unexpected goal – the game’s only goal – past Cape keeper Tessa Goldstein late in sudden death on Saturday afternoon. Roy found the back of the net from an unlikely location to snatch the State title and shock the stadium. After all, a certain expectant tension, a sense that the back-and-forth match would inevitably end in penalty kicks, had begun to settle on the action.

“Waterville really stepped it up in the second half,” Cape head coach Craig Fannan said. “And then we just couldn’t really get back in the game.”

The 1-0 defeat on neutral ground – the bout unfolded at Deering – concludes Cape’s 2014 at 12-5-1; they entered the postseason seeded third, behind No. 2 Yarmouth and No. 1 Greely, both of whom the Capers had to overcome in order to meet the Panthers. They managed, though, knocking off the Clippers 1-0 in the B West Semis and then the Rangers 2-1 on PKs in the Regional Finals.

Waterville, on the other hand, clearly loomed over their Eastern brethren. They entered the playoffs ranked first, and trotted onto the field at Deering on Saturday with 17 wins under their cleats – that’s 17 wins, zero losses, and zero ties. They trotted off again, after collapsing OT beneath the weight of their endurance and skill, at 18-0-0.

Play, for the first 94-plus minutes, seesawed up and down the field. Each team controlled for long stretches: the Panthers applied heavy pressure in the early going, though the Capers broke loose at times to generate quick chances of their own, and then really took over the attack for the last, say, 20 minutes or so of the first half.

“We obviously met them last year,” Fannan said, “so we knew that they’d be very physical, very athletic. We tried to mix our style of play up a little bit; we tried to be a little bit more direct and not get caught in midfield. That’s where they put a lot of pressure on us, so it was all about getting the balls in to our forward.”

“For the first half, it worked. We could’ve been two or three goals up – we had two off the post,” Fannan said.

Any number of players looked dangerous on the attack – Waterville’s Roy and Sarah Shoulta spring readily to mind, as do Cape’s Montana Braxton, Kathryn Clark and others – but both defenses proved equal to the challenges they faced.

And the keepers! Goldstein and her Panthers counterpart, Gabrielle Martin, stopped every shot they were called on to stop: From low-velocity grounders to high balls threatening to squeeze beneath the crossbar to hard blasts necessitating spectacular dives, the duo did it all.

In the second half, Waterville regained the edge. Fatigue, perhaps, played a role in the momentum shift: while both teams had earned their Regional wins less than 72 hours earlier, Cape’s battle with Greely had run to 110 minutes and beyond. The Panthers’ conquest of Hermon had required nothing more than the regulation 80 minutes.

“Our legs started to tell a little bit. We had a 110-minute matchup Wednesday with a man down for 60 minutes and four players missing,” Fannan said, referring to the Greely game, in which the Capers pulled a red card. “So I really felt that the injuries and the legs took a toll on us.”

An extra half-hour’s play might not seem like much to the average spectator, but consider that it represents almost 40 percent more soccer than two standard halves. From an athlete’s perspective, every exerted second accrues, wears on the body, not to mention the mind, necessitating ever more rest. From an athlete’s perspective, OT, and especially double-OT, is draining.

In the second half of Saturday’s contest, the Panthers pushed much of the action back into Cape’s end. Still, the Capers defended admirably and continued generating quick drives and solid chances. Play passed into OT, chewed through minutes and minutes, looking headed for yet another period.

In fact, with both teams’ defenses and keepers so strong, so focused, play seemed bound to end in PKs. With 4:30 remaining, Goldstein delivered arguably the game’s most thrilling save yet, diving left to grab a cannonball of a shot; then, less than a minute later, Martin matched, making nearly the same save on her end of the field. Would anybody flinch?

With 38.1 seconds to play, Cape did. Thirty yards out and way left of center, Roy dumped a shot toward Goldstein’s domain. The low-odds ball looked sure to just miss, to sidle past the top-right corner of the cage – but instead, it ducked inside, over Goldstein, for a sudden, jaw-dropping game-ender.

“It was going to take that kind of goal to beat us,” said Fannon, “because even though we’re tired, we’re pretty organized, defensively. We’ve got some great individual defenders back there. So it was going to take something special to beat us, and [Roy] hit one in 100, one in a million – whatever odds you want to call it. It was a great strike to win the game.”

So the Capers close on a loss. Nevertheless, they built a remarkable season, one to take pride in. “The season on the whole has been fantastic,” said Fannon. “We’ve had an up-and-down season in terms of the standings; we lost a couple games early on, we lost twice to Greely in the regular season, so it hasn’t all been plain sailing. But the girls have fought tooth and nail to get where they are today, and I really couldn’t ask anything more from them.”

Cape middie Victoria Diaz blocks the Panthers’ Sarah Shoulta from the ball.Cape’s Kathryn Clark and Waterville’s Jordan Jabar clash over a header.Caper Emma Landes edges past the Panthers’ Mackenzie St. Pierre.Montana Braxton’s intricate footwork for Cape Elizabeth juiced her student fan contingent to loud cheers. Here, she outmaneuvers Waterville’s Lydia Roy, who eventually scored the game-winning coal.Capers co-Captain Brett Lennon throws in the ball from the sidelines.Mariah Deschino boots a corner in for Cape vs. Waterville Saturday afternoon.Cape goalie Tessa Goldstein crouches during the awards ceremony after her team fell to Waterville in the Class B State Final Saturday afternoon. At her feet, her individual runners-up award sits on the grass.The Cape captains – Montana Braxton (20), Brette Lennon (15) and Kathryn Clark (7) – struggle to smile for the cameras, and hesitate to hold aloft their runners-up plaque.