Taking a 1-0 lead to halftime, the Oak Harbor soccer team had one objective for the second half of its final game Thursday night: defend its own goal with everything it had.

“We were just going to lay back and counterattack — we almost pulled it off,” OHHS head coach Steve Barker said.

Instead the Wildcats suffered brief defensive lapses that let Marysville-Pilchuck tie the contest early in the second half, then score an overtime goal to nab a 2-1 victory.

Even with the disappointing defeat, Barker couldn’t have been happier with the effort he got from his players in the final game.

“There wasn’t anybody that didn’t play well tonight,” he said.

Oak Harbor took the initial advantage during the 27th minute.

Junior Greg Hanshaw started off a perfectly-executed play by throwing the ball in from about 20 yards upfield from the Tomahawk goal. Doing a backflip, Hanshaw launched the ball into the center of the goalbox where senior Marc Ferguson flipped a header to an open Bryan Fakkema on the left side. Fakkema took the pass, moved around the defense with one juke and placed the ball in the right bottom corner of the net past Marysville goalkeeper Justin Palmer.

Although the Wildcats only took four shots in the second half, they kept constant pressure on the Tomahawk defense, pushing the ball to Marysville’s end of the field about 50 percent of the first half.

Things changed in the second half, however.

Wanting to take a more defensive approach, the Wildcats didn’t get the ball into the Tomahawk end of the field hardly at all, getting just three shot attempts for the half.

Marysville, who took 10 second-half shots, struck in the 44th minute when Tyson Farley capitalized on a defensive breakdown by the Wildcats that allowed the forward to set up untouched from 10 yards out and hit an opening in the upper left corner of the net.

OHHS goalkeeper Brian Wandell was a brick wall from that moment on, blocking the next seven shots on goal and sending the game into overtime.

It didn’t take long for the Tomahawks to strike in the OT, however, surprising the Wildcats on a throw in.

On a set play, Farley snuck behind the defense on a long throw-in and tapped the ball just out of the reach of Wandell, ending the game in sudden death.

“You could see it was a set piece, that’s why I was yelling at one of the guys to pick the runner because I could see him coming,” Barker said.

The loss left the Wildcats with a final record of 1-13-2, but that didn’t seem to matter to Barker, who was overcome with emotion after the game.

“There’s a lot of decent human beings on that team,” he said. “We had to play over our heads almost every night and we never flinched, nobody ever complained — it was a great group of people to coach.”