NEPSAC gameday takeaways: Taft earns big win as Choate-Suffield, Brooks-St. George’s draw

Alex Calabro (23) scored twice for Taft in a key victory. (Brian Kelly/NESJ)

If this chaotic season does indeed end with a Taft three-peat, the third of those three championships earned in the inaugural open tournament, Hiro Suzuki’s team — and the rest of New England, for that matter — might look back at Wednesday afternoon as the moment the winds began to shift toward the Rhinos.

The two-time defending Class A champions had been excellent, no doubt. They were undefeated and had conceded all of four goals in the first nine games of the Suzuki era. But for a program that, lest we overlook, hasn’t lost a match in over 700 days, the feeling of inevitability Taft had assumed in the previous two seasons hadn’t been all that present. During a NEPSAC campaign that has lacked a truly dominant team, the Rhinos were no exception: before Wednesday, they’d yet to score multiple goals in a game during October.

Then Avon Old Farms came to town. The first big Founders League test. The unofficial start of the back stretch of the season, one in which numerous teams in New England enter with everything to gain and everything to lose.

And Taft, the No. 2 team in our latest poll, looked like Taft again, putting together as dominant a performance against a formidable opponent as anyone in the NEPSAC has all season.

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The Rhinos’ 4-1 victory headlined the results of the three most significant matches from a crowded NEPSAC gameday. Down the road in Wallingford, Conn., No. 7 Choate and No. 8 Suffield Academy battled to a 0-0 draw, and in North Andover, Mass., a massive ISL tilt between No. 3 Brooks and No. 9 St. George’s also ended scoreless, continuing the run of ties between New England’s top teams, one of the defining trends of the campaign.

We watched all three matches on livestream. Let’s talk about ‘em: