NASHUA – The sour taste of defeat had lingered for nearly three weeks and the John Stark girls’ soccer team wanted to wash it out. 

Oct. 14 was the last time the Generals suffered a loss and it came at the hands of Bow, a team that came screaming into the Division II tournament on an 11-game winning streak and was focused on conquering the division it had just joined this fall.

But the Generals weren’t intimated by the 2015 Division III champions, and beating the Falcons in the semifinals wasn’t just about getting even for one loss in October. After all, John Stark has its own championship ambitions in mind.

Stark’s dreams of claiming a Division II title moved another step closer to becoming reality for the third-seeded Generals, as they beat No. 2 Bow, 2-1, thanks to a bent-in snipe in the top-right corner from senior Morgan Hawkes late in double overtime.

“That was an unbelievable shot, but that’s one of our leaders,” John Stark Coach Heather Doucette said. “She’s one of our seniors and she was determined to win. This is her last year and she didn’t want this to be her last 40 minutes.”

Nobody in Stellos Stadium seemed to think Hawkes’s shot would be the one to end it as it came off her foot.Nearly 80 minutes had passed since either team had scored. The Generals and Falcons battled through the second half and an overtime period where John Stark showed a more aggressive and coordinated attack, peppering Bow netminder Bridget Ehrenberg with one shot after another. But Ehrenberg kept turning them away, including four saves in the first overtime period. The Generals kept the pressure up, though, hoping one would slip in and be their golden goal. 

“I just saw it coming and winged it,” Hawkes said after the game, still trying to catch her breath. “I thought it was going to go a little wide, but it curved in.”A loose ball bounced her way and Hawkes fired it in from the outside corner of the box, about 18 yards from the net, a straight beam cutting through the air just over the heads of multiple Bow defenders. It looked wide, but the right amount of spin looped the ball just to the left and it snuck through a tight gap between the crossbar and side post to hit the inner right side of the net.

The John Stark girls stormed the field in excitement as well as relief that their attack had finally paid off. The Generals controlled possession for most of the game and found the scoreboard first on a rebound goal for senior midfielder Brooke Shatney about five minutes in.

Later, in the 21st minute, Bow hit the equalizer on a slow poke from Jordan Kania that rolled across the line after a misplayed save attempt squirted out and no Stark defenders were around to back up their goalie.

“They started out strong on us, kind of put us on our back foot,” said Bow Coach Jay Vogt. “But we recovered and scored that goal, which was huge for us to get us some confidence and get us some energy.”

The Falcons’ energy was spent more in their defensive end, where they were still successful in sweeping away the Stark attack.

But with each clearing, Stark gathered the ball again and brought it back down to Bow’s defense. The Falcons’ struggled to get any transition moving up the field to set up a play.

“Where we struggled was to get it from our defense to our midfield to our forwards,” Vogt said. That “allowed (Stark) to just knock the ball up the field.”

John Stark will face No. 5 Oyster River in the Division II final Sunday at noon in Exeter. Oyster River knocked off No. 8 Hanover, 1-0, in the second game of Wednesday night’s Final Four double-header. 

Bow and Stark finished the regular season with identical records at 13-3, but Bow had the advantage of the head-to-head win going into Thursday’s game.

Heading into the second overtime period, Doucette reminded her players how far they had come since that game in October to get this close to the championship.

“I said ‘Don’t let this go,’ ” Doucette said. “Keep working through it, and they did. We can do anything if we do it as a team and we do it as a unit.”