Playing well, in the second quarter, the game was 8-6 in Laval's favor, and something that always seems to happen occurred. Laval suddenly capitalized on 2 of our turnovers and increased their lead to 18-6 within the span of five minutes. This was something that coach McGrath warned us about: if we ever let up for a couple of minutes, they are a team that will make us pay, especially when they are feeding off of their fan's energy. Contrary to last week though, we were optimistic going into the locker room, as we had added another field goal, reducing the margin to nine. We knew that we were playing well, and that if we could limit our mistakes in the second half, the game was ours.
Points were hard to come by in the second half, as both teams traded field position back and forth. We were able to score twice more, unfortunately settling for field goals again. These points did put us within 1 score of taking the lead though, and we had the momentum. With the ball at midfield and 3 minutes left in the fourth quarter, we were forced to punt, and trusted our defense to get the ball back. Laval's dagger though was a first down conversion on second and fifteen that brought the ball deep into our end. They kicked a field goal to go up by 2 scores, and effectively ended the game.
Despite the result, I think this was our best-played game of the season so far, but once again, our miscues made the difference. We outplayed Laval, but we were unable to force them to turn the ball over; and just as we feared, they put up ten points on 2 of our successive turnovers. I do think that as a team, we can take a lot of positives out of this game, and I know that we are a better team than our 2-2 record indicates. We have another tough game coming up this weekend against Montreal, and I'm hoping we will be able to add another W in the 'win' column against them.
