Al Freeman and South Side boys soccer stood at midfield alongside Massapequa boys soccer just three days after 9/11 in 2001. The national anthem boomed across the field, but not one person was thinking about the game that was to come.

Freeman, who coached the varsity program from 1979 to 2007 and the junior varsity program prior, didn’t remember how the game went. Who would? But he did remember a sixth-grade ball boy coming up to him and introducing himself.

“He said to me, ‘My dad passed away in 9/11,’” Freeman said. “I said, ‘Pat, I know.’”

That’s because the ball boy was Pat Tighe, whose father, Steve, had played under Freeman for South Side in the 1970s. Both Steve and Pat Tighe’s uncle/godfather, Tim O’Brien, had died in the tragedy as employees of financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald

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