Laura Ornes ran away from the goal as the final second ticked off the clock at the Field of Dreams and promptly embraced Taylor Waite, Allie Smouse, Hayley Kaufman and Lauren De Carolis.

Crescent Valley High's girls soccer team was ready to celebrate and the party started with that group of defenders, who stymied West Albany on Tuesday night.

"Our defense played amazing," junior midfielder/forward Caitlin Drost said. "Taylor Waite stepped up, Allie Smouse stepped up, Hayley Kaufman, all of them, really. I've never seen them play so well.

"They just all worked together."

Drost knocked home the Mid-Willamette Conference game's only goal in the 16th minute, lifting the Raiders to a 1-0 victory over West Albany and a share of the the conference championship.

CV last shared the MWC crown with rival Corvallis in 2007. And CHS had an influence on this title, as the Spartans dealt CV (11-3-1, 6-1) a 3-2 loss last week.

Had the Raiders fallen to West Albany, they would have finished third in the conference and opened the 5A playoffs on Saturday. Instead, they have a first-round bye as the No. 1 seed and will host a second-round game on Nov. 10.

"It's a huge win for the girls, emotionally, to come back and win that league title," CV coach Andrew Donaldson said. "In some ways, we were happy for CHS; they've had such a tough season, losing Dan (Finnen) is an incredible thing.

"It's never, ever, good to lose to CHS, we want to beat them every year. But at the end of that day, we still had a chance to win the league title and we were OK with knowing that for a team, it helped them."

The Raiders had to wait six days to put that bittersweet loss in the past.

Doing so wasn't easy. West Albany tested their defense repeatedly, but each time came up short of a goal.

"We created some opportunities we did in past games, but I've just got to credit the CV defense," WA coach Erik Ihde said. "They locked down on some stuff pretty well."

As the game moved along, the Bulldogs (12-3-0, 6-1) applied more and more pressure. CV's defense never blinked.

"They have some really good forwards and our plan of attack was to play it around the outside and get it out," Waite said. "We didn't want their forwards to come at us."

The Bulldogs had chances in both halves, but were never able to get a foot on the ball with the goal fully exposed.

"We had some times where we burned the defense and beat the keeper and we were just a couple of steps off from putting the ball in the net," Ihde said.

Each time the Raiders rallied. They finished with a 3-1 edge in corner kicks.

"We got quite lucky a couple of times with a lack of calls, but Taylor Waite, she made some tremendous saves," Donaldson said. "She cleared one down here off the line and just made a couple of game-saving tackles down near the end. Laura (Ornes) did a great job coming off the line.

"Defensively, we were solid. There's still some things we can work on, but the girls came out with absolute intensity. It was just a lot, a lot of fun to watch."

Crescent Valley 1, West Albany 0

First half

CV: Caitlin Drost (Marissa Kovac), 23:34