By Andy Hutchison

WILTON — The Staples field hockey team is headed to the FCIAC Championship game. 

The top-seeded Wreckers shut out No. 4 Greenwich 3-0 in Saturday afternoon’s semifinals at neutral site Wilton High.

The Wreckers will face No. 2 Darien in Tuesday’s championship, back at Wilton at 6:30 p.m.

Mary Stevens scored twice and Alex Hackett found the back of the cage in the semifinal win.

Staples scored all three of its goals off penalty corners. The Wreckers led 1-0 at halftime and most of the way through the third quarter before putting the game out of reach.

In fact, the second tally came after time had expired at the end of the third quarter. The Wreckers earned a penalty corner just before the clock hit zero and, by rule, corners unfold as untimed plays ending either with a goal or stop on defense.

The Wreckers got the former as Hackett capitalized. This goal was a relief for the Wreckers as much as a back-breaker for the Cardinals. It came on the 17th corner of the game and gave Staples some well-deserved breathing room.

“I knew at some point it was going to come,” Staples Coach Ian Tapsall said of the Wreckers breaking through.

After Greenwich applied pressure for the first seven-plus minutes of the fourth the Wreckers converted on their first chance of the fourth and second consecutive corner opportunity.

Stevens scored her second when she redirected a shot by Tyla Ozgen with 7:22 to play in the fourth.

Staples racked up a whopping 20 corners in the game, a testament to the team’s offensive prowess and ability to pressure the opposing defense. Tapsall and his players would have liked to have been rewarded a bit more for those efforts.

The Staples coach said the players put too many shots on the Greenwich goalie and that they need to get more shots toward the sides for tips and deflections.

“We definitely need to finish in the circle,” Hackett concurred.

But the outcome is exactly what the Wreckers were looking for as they are one step closer to a championship.

“It could have been better but, all in all, I’m really happy with the result,” Tapsall said.

“We knew it was going to be tough,” said Stevens, noting that the Wreckers had a hard-fought 2-0 win over GHS in the regular slate. “We knew we could do it.”

And now the Wreckers will look for a repeat performance against one of the few conference rivals to challenge them this fall. Staples defeated Darien 5-2 in their regular season meeting.

Andy Hutchison has been covering school sports — including Staples athletics — as well as news and feature stories in Fairfield County, since the 1990s.