Jessica Spitzer scored her first goal of the season, but a late goal from UL Lafayette handed the Northwestern State soccer team a 1-1 draw Sunday evening at the Demon Soccer Complex.

“I think that’s a fair result,” head coach Ian Brophy said. “I thought it was a pretty even match, back-and-forth. We took advantage of our set piece and got in front. I would have liked to see us close out the game, but (UL Lafayette) had a great goal to tie it up in the last couple minutes.

“That is the hard part, when you’re a couple minutes away, you want to see it out, and we were close to doing that. We have to look at the things we can improve upon in how we end games, but I am overall happy with the performance.”

NSU (4-1-2) scored on a scramble in the 72nd minute by Spitzer following the corner kick from Emma Pethel, who recorded her sixth career assist and second this season.

“Jess is a really good finisher for a center back,” Brophy said. “She is a goal scorer on corner kick situations, so I wasn’t surprised to see her get on the end of it.”

It looked like it was going to be the difference until UL Lafayette (3-3-1) scored in the 89th minute off a perfectly placed shot off the foot of Miku Kurihara from the left side of the box to tie it at 1-1.

It was just the second goal surrendered by NSU in the last five contests.

The Ragin’ Cajuns had chances to score and take the win in the final minute and a half, but the Demons defense stood tall and emerged with the tie.

After the Demons goal, ULL recorded eight of their 12 second half shots and 21 shots overall as the Ragin’ Cajuns pushed to try to score the equalizer, which they ended up scoring.

ULL led in shots 21-8, including 12-2 in the second half.

Despite the fact that the Ragin’ Cajuns scored late, redshirt freshman goalkeeper Audrey Marfia had a second consecutive sensational showing, stopping seven shots overall, including seven in the second half, many of which kept NSU in front.

“She was fantastic,” Brophy said. “She made some really big saves that helped keep us in the match. I was really excited to see her performance with those big saves, which was encouraging in terms of what she can do this year and what she’s been working on. That was awesome to watch.”

The Demons head to Abilene Christian on Thursday for the last non-conference game before Southland Conference play begins with a trip to UTRGV on Sept. 18.