It no longer is The Little Engine that Could. It has become a bullet train.
Babylon’s boys soccer team shocked many, including maybe itelf, when it pulled off the upset to win a Suffolky title last season. This time around, it looks very capable of winning a state championship.
Babylon scored three first-half goals, including a pair by Lucas Montalto, and rolled to a 4-0 win over Nassau champ Locust Valley on Tuesday to capture the Long Island Class B championship at Mitchel Field.
This is the first Long Island championship for Babylon (17-2) in boys soccer and sends it to Saturday’s Southeast Regional final, where it will host either Westlake of Section I or Marlboro Central of Section IX in a 3 p.m. match at Diamond in the Pines.
The Panthers have won 12 straight and, as Montalto put it, “there’s more to come.”
“They were mostly juniors and finished last season with an upset of an excellent Center Moriches team and, I think, saw that they could be so much more,” Babylon coach Dennis McGovern said. “There was no state tournament last year [because of the coronavirus pandemic] and now they have one. They’re hungry. At halftime I could hear them talking all ‘we’re not done.’”
Babylon established itself as the aggressor early and it paid off quickly. Carlos Berrios found Cole Conboy on the left side with a clean look and he put the ball in the upper right corner of the net from about 35 yards out during the fourth minute for the first goal.
“They left a bunch of room in the midfield and that’s a shot I’ll take all day,” Conboy said. “Carlos put it right there for me.”
“Cole started as our best defender,” McGovern said of the junior. “We moved him to midfield and he became our best midfielder. So we moved him up to the front line and again he’s making it look like a good move.”
Both of Montalto’s goals came on direct kicks. The first one came in the 11th minute on his kick from about 40 yards out. Berrios took the second direct kick and Montalto raced in before it could reach the goal and deflected it into the lower left corner.
Luca Giammarino added a second-half goal for Babylon.
All that was left to do was hold Locust Valley (8-7-3) in check and the defense – led by Berrios and Giammarino – was suffocating. Panthers goalkeeper Troy Schipf needed to make only one save for his sixth shutout. As McGovern said, “you need a whole unit to defend like that.”
“We believe we’re good enough to win the state, but we won’t ever look past the next game,” Conboy said. “Our job is not finished yet.”
