Junior midfielder Brendan Lambe took the touch, his hips swiveling open, the recent memory already forming in his subconscious. Ball at his feet. Top of the box. Just like in a preseason match two weeks ago.
Lambe missed that time.
“I hit, like, where the crossbar and the post meet,” Lambe said. “So could have been a banger.”
This time, in the 40th minute Sunday against Stetson, it was. Lambe’s head went down. His left arm flung out, like a lever. His foot rammed into the ball, driving it low and hard — and into the goal, never mind the helpful deflection on the way.
“I figured,” Lambe said of the parallel with the shot in preseason, “save it for the season and hopefully score this.”
An hour later, the shot stood as the winner in the Cavaliers’ (2-0-0, 0-0-0 ACC) 1-0 victory over the Hatters (0-2-0, 0-0-0 ASUN) at Klöckner Stadium, after a weather delay pushed the game’s kickoff back by 50 minutes. It made it Virginia's first time since 2021 starting the season with two wins.
Lambe’s goal did not, at the time, figure to be the game’s only one. Not in an affair where Virginia hogged 62 percent of the possession, 64 percent of it in Stetson’s half.
“Do I think we could have had a second one?” Coach George Gelnovatch said.
None of the scattered crowd needed to hear the rhetorical question answered. Senior midfielder Umberto Pela squandered a chance in the first half. Freshman forward Nick Simmonds frittered away another deep in the second. There were more chances, too.
“This time of year, you’re just missing a little bit of that fitness and sharpness to finish that one and take care of the game,” Gelnovatch said. “So you leave a little hope, and you leave a little energy for them down the stretch, and hitting long balls and second balls. It gets a little bit hairy.”
But only a little bit. Stetson sophomore midfielder Benjamin Donato nearly manufactured one moment of second-half brilliance. But Virginia’s defenders, starting with 6-foot-4 graduate student Sebastian Pop, snuffed out almost everything else.
That resulted in another clean sheet, Virginia’s second in a row to start the season after Thursday’s 2-0 win against San Diego State. The streak marks the first time since 2019 Virginia has gone its first two games without conceding.
The wins have come so far against two reigning regular-season conference champions, San Diego State of the WAC and Stetson of the ASUN. Virginia’s next game is Thursday at George Mason at 7 p.m. The Patriots were A10 regular-season champions last season.
The procession of champions, at least in its first two stops, has only gotten harder as it has gone along.
“San Diego State fired out a lot more,” Lambe said. “They came and pressed us, which made it a little bit easier.”
Stetson tried a different tactic. It came out in a low 4-4-2, compact, disciplined, a vacuum-sealed block. If there were any doubts about its disposition, they were dispelled by the first play of the game, when Stetson thumped the ball deep into Virginia territory.
Virginia struggled to deconstruct the block. It managed, despite the way things felt, only 10 shots to Stetson’s eight.
“We had some chances, but they were good, pretty organized,” Lambe said. “They came out actually more defensive in the second half, but they were hard to beat.”
The goal, after Virginia’s early possession, felt almost a little delayed in arriving. But delayed, then again, was the story of the day.
Thunder delayed kickoff and kept rolling, distant and intermittent, confining the teams to their locker rooms. Each half started with a delay as something got ironed out backstage, AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and “T.N.T.” playing for far too long.
There was a delay in ending the game, when the visitors tried twice to throw the ball in from too far up, causing the referee to scream at a coach, in a voice that carried, “Stop. Stop. Stop. Sit down!”
Carry it a bit further. There have been delays this season, for two of Virginia’s best players, in stepping onto the field. Senior defender Nick Dang and senior midfielder Reese Miller, each coming back from injury, have not yet played. They passed a ball on the side during warmups, Dang wearing cleats, Miller in sneakers.
Their absences, Gelnovatch indicated, are nearing an end. But the delay is ongoing.
There were no delays, though, after the final buzzer Sunday. Not in the substitutes rushing onto the field, and not in the locker room celebration that reverberated outside on a wet night in August, early in a season with budding promise.
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