Berwyn resident Juan Hernandez dreamed of playing against his hometown Morton team.

The St. Laurence senior’s reality exceeded his dreams as he scored the lone goal in a 1-0 victory over Morton during Saturday’s Class 3A Hinsdale Central Sectional championship game.

St. Laurence (22-2-4) advances to Monday’s Class 3A Lyons super-sectional against Lincoln-Way Central (18-4).

“I’m going to be completely honest, I dreamed about this game,” Hernandez said. “I’ve been wanting to play them since my freshman year, ever since I got to St. Laurence, and now I got the chance my senior year to put a goal against them.”

The Vikings last won a sectional in 2023 when they took third in the state in Class 2A. They were bumped up to 3A this year.

“I would’ve gone to Morton,” Hernandez explained. “Actually the head coach begged me to go to the team, but I found (St. Laurence head coach) Jaime (Alonso) my eighth-grade year and he was on a two-hour call with my mom and I just came here. It’s a great school, honestly. I’d say it’s better than a public school for sure.”

Hernandez was thrilled for his team but had empathy for his buddies on the other side.

“Those are the guys from my neighborhood school where I was supposed to go, honestly, and all those guys are my buddies,” he said. “After we scored our first goal we didn’t try to score more. We just defended the whole game and honestly you see the result. And they’re a great team, a wonderful team.”

It took one to beat one.

“I said this at the beginning of the season,” Hernandez said. “This (St. Laurence) is a wonderful team. The team we have is a beautiful team. And we’re a family. We play strong. We fight through anything, honestly. We grew a great bond out of the field, but you can tell on the field we’re a bunch of dogs, honestly.”

Hernandez scored in the 12th minute, finishing the cross that junior Cesar Rivera played to his left foot.

“Chance-wise we had the one breakdown in the first half that we talked about before the game,” Morton coach Jim Bageanis said. “We can’t leave anybody open in the box and we did and they got that first goal and the rest we kind of went back and forth the whole game. Even though they had a little possession, we had chances, they had chances and, you know, we just didn’t capitalize on the opportunities we had.”

One of their best ones came off the foot of junior Alfredo “Freddy” Campos deep in the box with a little more than five minutes remaining.

“I thought Freddy was maybe going to tie it when he got that ball on his left foot and turned in the box late, hit it over, but got deflected we thought,” Bageanis said. “But St. Laurence did a great job. They played right with us, got that one breakdown and made the most out of it. Congrats to them.”

If Morton was looking for an early wake-up call, Hernandez delivered it, rousing them from any slumber at about quarter past 11 a.m.

“I mean it definitely woke us up that we started out very slowly because of something on our part,” Morton junior defender Isaac Alvarez said. “After they scored I felt like we played better. We were just unfortunate we couldn’t get one in the back of the net.”

Morton (21-3-2) was looking to win its first sectional title since 2021. Its 21 wins matched that team’s. They will lose 13 seniors.

“They don’t care how many they won, it’s the one they lost now,” Bageanis said. “But we did the best we could.”