For Cornell midfielder Joe Boulukos, there’s nothing quite like playing in the Carrier Dome. He loves the atmosphere and crowd noise.

Boulukos had played at the Dome twice, but he’d yet to emerge with a victory. Tuesday night he changed all that and put on a great show as well.

He scored a career-high seven goals and eight points in Cornell’s 16-14 win over Syracuse.

‘There aren’t many places like this,’ Boulukos said.

‘We came out of the locker room flat, except for this guy on my left,’ Tambroni said pointing to his 6-foot, 210-pound middie. ‘He allowed us to stay in the game when things weren’t going well.

‘If it wasn’t for him, I’m not sure we would’ve gotten over that hump.’

Tambroni referred to Cornell’s slow start. Syracuse built three-goal leads several times in the first half while the Big Red struggled to get its offense started. Boulukos scored four first-half goals.

He entered the game with 14 goals and nine assists, but quickly added to that total. Repeatedly, he used his big, bulky frame to separate himself from SU’s defenders. Both Scott Ditzell and Steve Panarelli tried defending Boulukos with little luck.

‘With two days to prepare, we didn’t do a good enough job separating him from the ball,’ said Syracuse head coach John Desko.

In the fourth quarter with 6:26 remaining, Boulukos easily burned Panarelli and scored, handing Cornell a 14-13 lead. He also added the clincher with 1:27 remaining, extending Cornell’s lead to 16-14.

When a reporter asked Desko if it’d been a while since he saw a performance like Boulukos’, he responded simply, ‘Yes, yea.’

‘Joey kind of cleared guys out on his own,’ Cornell junior attack Derek Haswell said. ‘A couple times he forced guys to slide and opened things up.’

X-man

Lacrosse is rough enough. But when Syracuse sophomore Danny Brennan won draw after draw on the face-off X, Cornell turned the game into a rugby match.

Brennan won 12-of-16 face-offs in the first half. To combat him, the Cornell face-off men flopped on the ball trying to make Brennan’s job more difficult.

‘They tried to make it more of a scrum,’ said Brennan, who finished 23-of-32 at the face-off X.

Brennan took every face-off but one. With 11 seconds remaining in the first half, Desko inserted senior Geoff Keough to take the draw. Keough lost it, though, and Cornell raced down the field and scored with one second left in the half.

Earlier this season, Desko experimented with a four-man rotation, using Brennan, Keough, Jon Jerome and Chris DiMarco. But Keough, who started much of last season, has struggled this year, winning just 48 percent of his draws. Jerome has won 2-of-7. And DiMarco, who is SU’s fourth option this season, has only played in three games this season, winning 1-of-5.

Eleven seconds to forget

As SU’s backup face-off man Keough trotted on the field with 11 seconds left in the first half, it looked pretty certain the Orange would head to the locker room with a lead.

SU led 8-7 at the time and a score in such a short period of time seemed unlikely. Keough won control of the face-off at first, but a Cornell player knocked the ball from his stick.

Cornell’s Mike Pisco fired a pass down the field to a wide-open Kevin Nee, who easily deposited the ball into the goal, tying the game.

‘It gave us huge momentum,’ Tambroni said. ‘It was the first time we had the look on our faces that we could beat these guys.’

The last minute of the first half proved disastrous for the Orange. It took an 8-6 lead with 1:39 remaining on a Greg Rommel score.

But the Big Red answered with two goals in the final 11 seconds. Boulukos scored the first on a crank shot and Nee tied the game.

Said Ditzell: ‘We had a lot of holes.’

Published on April 12, 2005 at 12:00 pm