Staff photo / Dan Hiner Canfield’s Kayleigh Carney (51) carries the ball up the field during Thursday’s game against Chagrin Falls in Canfield.

CANFIELD — One seven-minute lapse cost the Canfield girls lacrosse team on Thursday at Bob Dove Field.

Chagrin Falls scored four goals in the first several minutes of the second quarter, and the Cardinals couldn’t complete the comeback in a 9-7 loss in Canfield.

“It’s definitely hard teaching young minds to try to dig themselves (out of a hole) after a couple goals are scored on them and try to adjust and make different changes to adapt and make changes to fix some of the issues,” Canfield head coach Megan Tyson said. “And in the second quarter, where they scored a majority of the goals to give them the lead, it was hard to get out of that.”

The Tigers scored two quick goals in the first three minutes. But Olivia Hash got the Cardinals (5-7-2) on the board at the 8:59 mark of the first when he drove down the middle of the Tigers’ defense and right to the net

The teams exchanged goals in the final minutes of the first, with Kayleigh Carney scoring with 22 seconds to go, and the Tigers led 3-2 going into the second quarter.

Canfield had an early opportunity to tie the game with 10:42 to play in the second. The Cardinals were a man up after a Chagrin Falls yellow card, but the Tigers killed off the penalty. Then Logan Kohanski scored to push Chagrin’s lead to 4-2.

It was the first of four straight goals by the Tigers in the first 6:57 of the quarter.

Hash added her second goal with 4:52 remaining in the second to stop the bleeding and cut the deficit to 7-3.

Sophia Spatar scored with a little good fortune. She was positioned in front of the net, and a pass made its way to the net front. But it bounced and hit Spatar and rolled into the net for a Cardinal goal.

The Tigers took a 7-4 lead into halftime.

The Cardinals struck first in the third. Carney got a pass right in front of the net, and she deposited it low for her second goal of the day. Then Jules Luce found the back of the net, and the Cardinals trimmed the lead to 7-6 in the first 3:35 of the third quarter.

“You don’t win games or have close losses without using each other,” Tyson said. “I think we got, if not as many assists as we did goals, half as many assists as we did goals, which is just as important.”

The Tigers (4-6) scored following a Canfield infraction and led 8-6 heading into the fourth quarter.

From that point, Canfield’s defense and Modarelli, who made 13 saves, held on for as long as they could. The Cardinals kept the Tigers off the board for nearly the entire fourth quarter.

“The offense gets all the glory, but you really can’t keep a game this close without the defense knocking it out, intercepting passes,” Tyson said.

Hash recorded a hat trick off a pass from Modarelli. She took a pass from the goalie around the Cardinals’ 45-yard line. She took it right to the net and scored high, cutting the lead to 8-7 with less than three minutes to play.

“(Hash) does a great job trying to get the ball to her players, create situations for other players as well as herself,” Tyson said. “One of the best things that she has, in my opinion, that’s very difficult to teach is she just has that knack for when to drive, for when to hold and when to pass.”

Chagrin Falls worked nearly two minutes off the clock, and Lyla Mihalek clinched the win for the Tigers with a goal.

The Cardinals have been hot and cold for the last month. The loss Thursday was their third straight, with the previous two coming to Poland and Uniontown Lake. Before the recent skid, the Cardinals went 3-0-1 in their previous four games, going back to March 30.

Tyson lost 11 seniors from last year’s squad, and this season’s group is filled with a number of new faces. So despite the loss, the Cardinals were in high spirits after the game.

“We definitely had a lot of shoes that needed to be filled. Half my team is brand new,” Tyson said. “We had a lot of (challenges). Sometimes we’ve found that rhythm, sometimes we haven’t. But tonight, it really started to click a little more than it has in the past, and I’m really proud of how far the girls have come along this season.”