Judging how the regular season played out, it’s likely the road to a Colonial League boys soccer championship will go through Northwestern.

Salisbury will get its chance sooner rather than later when the league tournament begins on Tuesday and the two teams square off at Northern Lehigh High School. Results from that semifinals matchup were not available at time of press.

After being awarded the No. 4 seed following last week’s 3-2 loss to Southern Lehigh (11-7 overall, 10-2 in Colonial League) in double overtime, the Falcons (14-4, 9-3) knew immediately which team awaited them in the semifinals.

The one thing going for the Falcons is that they’re the only team responsible for a Northwestern loss, that coming in a nonconference meeting on the first day of October.

“The winner or the loser most likely is going to have to go through Northwestern somewhere along the line anyways,” head coach Mark Allinson said. “We’ll take our shot at them whenever that is.

“I think we match up better against Moravian Academy. But we’ve seen them [Northwestern] twice, so we can work on some things and see what we can do.”

The Spartans’ win over Salisbury stationed them with the No. 3 seed, while Northwestern and Moravian Academy hold down the first and second spots, respectively.

After seeing the first overtime session come and go without a goal, much of the first 10 minutes of the second frame produced plenty of the same.

But with under four minutes to play, Southern Lehigh put the game away. Alex Sabram dodged a couple of Salisbury defenders in the corner of the Falcons’ territory, and set up a ball in front of the net where Sam Marshall was there for the game-winning tally.

“They had a couple of more opportunities [in overtime] I would think,” Allinson said. “We certainly didn’t sub as often as they did…I thought we did some very nice things out there. I thought if we could have capitalized on an opportunity here or there, we would have squeaked that through.”

Early on, it looked as if Salisbury would have enough to get by the Spartans, and subsequently avoid Northwestern in the first round. Just a little more than five minutes into play, James Handinger gathered a ball in front of the Spartans’ goal and fired a shot into the back of the cage.

But Southern Lehigh responded at the end of the first half with two goals 4:21 apart. Marshall first cleaned up a loose ball in front of Falcon goalie Tyler Keller after a Spartan corner kick to even the score. Jacob Cassell then set up Joseph Minguillan for the go-ahead goal with 5:44 to play in the first half.

It didn’t take long for the Falcons to tie it up once the second half got underway. Despite being surrounded by multiple Southern Lehigh defenders, Zach Adams broke through and lofted a shot over the Spartans’ goalie with 30:08 left of the clock.

Both teams had opportunities to close out the final 30-plus minutes of play, but none came closer to producing a goal than Patrick Adams’ shot with under 17 minuets to play.

Adams lined up a shot from straight on, but the ball hit the crossbar and bounced directly down on the field in front of the white goal line.

“We capitalized on what they were giving us,” Allinson said. “I wish we would have capitalized on it a little bit more, particularly down the left flank. But our boys are smart and resilient. They’ll learn from it and hopefully bounce back next week.”