Late touchdowns lift Oceanside

Trailing East Meadow by a touchdown with a little more than six minutes remaining in last Saturday night’s Conference I football showdown, Oceanside stuck to its offensive game plan.

The strategy was to put the ball in the hands of senior Tariek Harris, who entered the fourth quarter with 105 yards rushing. Harris dazzled in crunch time, ripping off a dynamic 74-yard touchdown run with 5:37 left to tie it and then a 1-yard scoring run with 3:12 to go to win it for the Sailors, 28-21. He finished with 282 yards on 28 carries, most out of the Wildcat formation.

“He’s a special player,” Oceanside head coach Rob Blount said of Harris, who changed direction three times and picked up a pair of blocks — one at the line and one downfield — from Gilly Ruiz on the game-tying touchdown. “Tariek was trapped behind some guys last year, but we knew he’d be a big part of this year’s team,” he added. 

It’s the second year in a row Oceanside (4-1) used second-half heroics to knock off East Meadow, which fell to 2-3. The Jets, down nine starters according to head coach Vin Mascia, scored twice in a span of 20 seconds late in the second quarter to erase a 14-point deficit and held a 21-14 lead after senior Nick Suchocki’s second touchdown of the night with 29 seconds to go in the third.

“I’m proud of how we battled, but we’re banged up and they wore us down,” Mascia said. “We had a lot of kids contribute and were in position to win, but give them credit for coming up with the big plays.”

Mascia handed the keys to the offense to freshman Anthony Love, a 6-foot-2 lefty, and liked what he saw. Love, who showed poise and patience and didn’t force any throws into coverage, threw the first touchdown pass of his career to get the visitors back in the game after Oceanside got an 8-yard touchdown run by JT D’Angelo and an 18-yard touchdown pass from sophomore quarterback Vincent Guarino to senior Timmy Nolan. On fourth-and-11 from the Sailors 32, Love checked off his intended target and hit a wide-open Suchocki behind the secondary. On the ensuing possession, the Jets pulled even on Damian Sanders’ 46-yard interception return for a touchdown.

“The [coaching] staff didn’t want to throw too much at him right away,” Mascia said of Love, who made his debut two weeks earlier in a win at Valley Stream Central. “He’s got all the tools. To hang in like he did tonight, on the road in front of a big crowd against a team like Oceanside, says a lot.”

Blount, who said he was impressed by Love, was “very pleased” with the performance of his defense. “We only allowed one score with our defense on the field,” Blount explained. “We got some big efforts from [Ryan] Hertling, [Francis] DiGiovanna, [Conor] Johnson, and [Morgan] McCarthy.”