Those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it.

Recent history showed that the Northwestern Lehigh boys lacrosse team played a flat game against Southern Lehigh in its regular-season-ending 5-3 loss to the Spartans.

With a week off before the District 11 Class 2A semifinal game against the same Southern Lehigh team, Tiger head coach Marcus Janda wasn’t taking any chances. With that in mind, Janda put the team through what he called “probably the hardest week of practice that we have had since the start of the season.”

The result was a 9-1 win for the Tigers Tuesday night at Emmaus High School, which sends the team to its third straight district championship and gives it the opportunity to defend last year’s championship.

Even without junior defenseman Jared Meck, who is recovering from an appendectomy, the defense carried the day for Northwestern Lehigh (12-7).

Goalie Bailen Smargiassi made 13 saves in the game, pushing him over the 600-save mark and leaving him at 610 saves going into the finals. The accomplishment is more impressive considering that Smargiassi was not the starting goalie until his junior season.

“I’m really happy with our defensive performance,” said Smargiassi. “I made a couple of good saves but really it was the defense in front of me. They never gave them an easy shot and the one time they did score it was a little miscommunication, but we corrected that.

“They told me at practice yesterday that I was three saves off of 600, but I wasn’t really thinking about that much during the game. I was just thinking about keeping the ball out of the net and not about 600.”

Southern Lehigh really didn’t find many true openings to get shots through. Sophomore Austin Bittenbender was tough on Southern Lehigh players looking to move the ball down the field and wound up in a couple of collisions that resulted in turnovers by Spartans players.

“It was really important to us to get this win because we just recently lost to them, so it was important for us to play really good defense,” said defenseman Carter Zentz. “I’m hoping for another district championship and another win.”

By the time the opening quarter reached the midway point, senior Stone Sosnovik had notched two goals, with freshman Tyler Kaas assisting on the first one after a strong set of passes to work the ball closer to the net. The second goal came after a Southern Lehigh penalty that left them a man down.

In the second quarter, Michael Lagowy, another freshman, made it 3-0 when he fired a shot past goalie Eli Dancho for a 3-0 lead.

The miscommunication that Smargiassi mentioned allowed Southern Lehigh to cut the lead to two goals with 1:09 left in the first half as the Spartans also used one of their freshmen players, Otto Young, to get the assist when he delivered a picture perfect pass from behind the net to Cade Robbins, who found himself with an open look to get Southern Lehigh on the board.

As the Spartans (10-9) became more frustrated, they committed more penalties that left them down a man and the Tigers took advantage of two of those opportunities.

Just 2:16 into the third quarter, Kaas moved toward the goal and faked a pass to beat Dancho and make it 4-1. After Sosnovik picked up his hat trick later in the quarter, Kaas took a feed from Sosnovik for his second goal of the game and 25th of the season.

With Northwestern up 6-1 going to the final quarter, the Tigers made it six unanswered goals thanks to another man advantage. Sosnovik put a shot on goal from about 10 yards out. Devon Hildebrand beat Dancho with a shot over his left shoulder and with just 1:11 left in the game, Blaine Snyder, the school’s all-time leader in goals scored moved toward his net and before crossing in front just used a quick flick of his wrists for his 140th career goal to finish the scoring and hand the Spartans a 9-1 loss.

Offensively, Sosnovik finished with four goals in the game and Kaas collected two. Lagowy, Hildebrand, and Snyder each collected a goal.

“We had tons of opportunities and I thought we could have put a couple more in the back of the net, but they played within the system, and they played selflessly and ultimately we capitalized enough times,” said Janda.

Central Catholic (11-7) won the other semifinal game Tuesday night at Emmaus when it beat Moravian Academy 20-12 to set up the third straight meeting between the Vikings and Tigers in the 2A championship game. After being denied their third straight championship last season, the Vikes got a little revenge with a 20-6 drubbing of the Tigers during the regular season.

“We look forward to those matchups and we have a little bit of a revenge tour going right now,” said Janda, whose team got the revenge it wanted against Southern Lehigh and now have Allentown Central Catholic in its sites.