CONCORD – Ronan Rattigan was in a familiar spot: bearing down on the goalkeeper with a heap of Bellarmine defenders strewn in the De La Salle midfielder’s wake after he had dribbled past his adversaries.
And just like his first goal, Rattigan shot the ball with such force that the ball almost ripped the net from the pipes after it lasered past the visiting goalkeeper on Thursday evening.
“Once I saw I was one on one with the keeper, I just had to score that one and secure the game,” said Rattigan, later adding, “Oh man, these are the games that we live for.”
His second goal of the second half came with seven minutes left in regulation, and rendered Bellarmine’s last-second goal irrelevant as De La Salle outlasted the Bells 4-3 in a thrilling NorCal Division I semifinal.
Rattigan and Preston Spalasso each scored twice for De La Salle, and Ben Sutton, Aidan Dempsey and Christian Sparacino scored for Bellarmine.
De La Salle (19-4-3) will face Everett Alvarez in the NorCal final on Saturday.
“This will be a great experience to go through, playing the last game of the season,” Brown said.
The battle of the Bay Area blue bloods lived up to the hype.
“The fact that there were six goals in the second half, a crazy second half, was nuts,” Bellarmine coach Conor Salcido said. “I’m super proud of our guys, and they fought. The fact that they scored in the final minute just showed that there was no quit with this group.”
Bellarmine has won 22 Central Coast Section titles and De La Salle has captured 14 North Coast Section crowns, both the most in their respective sections.
Each came agonizingly close to adding hardware to their crowded trophy cases a week prior, but neither did.
De La Salle lost 2-1 to Dougherty Valley in the NCS D-I final, while the Bells lost a two-goal lead in the CCS D-I championship match and fell 4-2.
The Spartans used that loss in the section championship match as motivation, taking down Edison-Fresno 2-0 on the road as the No. 6 seed, before going up by a goal in the first three minutes of Thursday’s match when Preston Spalasso finished off a low cross in the box.
“That Dougherty game was just a minor setback,” Rattigan said. “It wasn’t the end of the season. We’re resilient and we’re ready for more.”
The Bells, which as the seventh seed had taken down Franklin Elk-Grove 1-0 on the road in the quarterfinal, took until the 37th minute to take their first shot against De La Salle.
Matthew Shimizu made a few darting runs as the team’s playmaking No. 10, but otherwise the San Jose school was relegated to ineffective long balls and sideways passes for almost the entire first half.
East Bay Athletic League defender of the year Matt Rajecki, all-EBAL selection Namir Shlah and Emiliano Cruz anchored an impenetrable back line for De La Salle.
That was until the final two minutes, when De La Salle’s defense was suddenly under siege and survived multiple shots on target in a row.
De La Salle seemed to get thins under control early in the second, when Spalasso tapped in another cross to give De La Salle a 2-0 lead with 45 minutes gone in the game.
But this time, Bellarmine responded with a shift from the 4-3-3- to the 4-4-2 formation and gained a newfound potency in the final third.
The Bells drew a foul in their box, and West Catholic Athletic League defender of the year Ben Sutton showed off his powerful shot by burying a penalty kick with 52 minutes having elapsed.
“A program like Bellarmine, with great tradition, great coaching and such great players, you know the game’s never going to be over until the whistle blows,” Brown said.
The scoring floodgates had officially opened in the powerhouses’ first matchup of the MaxPreps era (2004 to present).
Three minutes after Sutton’s goal, Rattigan powered through his Bellarmine defender on a counterattack, jetting down the left sideline before shooting far post to give De La Salle a 3-1 lead.
“I’ve been watching him do that for a long time now,” Brown said. “Obviously it’s a great moment for him to do that in, and he’s really been stepping up lately. He’s the most targeted player we have, but he still finds those moments to produce.”
In the 64th minute, it was Bellarmine’s turn to score. Striker Aidan Dempsey used his physicality to wedge himself in the box during a mad scramble between teammates and adversaries, with Dempsey controlling the rebound and slotting in the ball to cut the deficit back to 3-2.
Rattigan’s second goal of the half put De La Salle back up by two, and despite over 10 minutes of added time, Bellarmine was unable to score until those extra minutes had almost completely elapsed.
Sparacino cut the deficit back to one, but the final whistle blew three times only a few seconds later to signal the end to Bellarmine’s season.
Even though it did not end with a 23rd CCS title or a third NorCal crown, it did see the Bells return to prominence after drudging through a 5-9-6 season in 2023-24.
“All of our returners, this past offseason, committed to make sure that they were back and ready to prove that Bellarmine was the South Bay powerhouse that we’d been for so long,” Salcido said. “To win league, be in the final for CCS and the semis of NorCal, I think that proves everything our guys wanted to prove.”
