SWARTHMORE, Pa. – Senior Michele Buonora's first-half goal proved to be the only score Tuesday night in the Haverford College women's soccer team's 1-0 win over host Swarthmore College in a tense, Centennial Conference tilt.

The victory moves Haverford (11-5, 6-3 CC) into a third-place tie with three other teams in the league standings. Swarthmore (7-7-2, 5-4) drops back into seventh place and, at least temporarily, behind the group hunting coveted spots in the five-team Centennial postseason tournament. League leader Dickinson College is, so far, the only lock for the playoff beginning next Wednesday.

Buonora scored the game-winner in the 36th minute, taking a feed from Katie Van Aken to knock in her third goal of the season.

Swarthmore out shot Haverford by a 20-9 margin and 11 of its shots made it on frame, but the steel door that Fords goalie Kayleigh Herrick-Reynolds constructed kept the Garnet scoreless for the senior goalie's eighth shutout of the season and 18th of her career.

Herrick-Reynolds finished with 10 stops in the win, seven coming after Buonora's late first-half marker. She got an early assist from her teammates when, in the sixth minute on Swarthmore's first shot on goal, a teammate cleared a ball to the side before it could cross the goal line behind the net minder.

The Garnet's Marie Mutryn finished with three saves between the pipes, all in the second half, but allowed a goal on the only shot she faced in the opening 45 minute stanza.

With one game remaining in the regular season for the Fords, Saturday at Walton Field when McDaniel (3-8-3, 2-6 CC) visits, a playoff spot in the league tournament is closer than it was prior to Tuesday's contest.

Two of the teams tied with the Fords, Gettysburg and Muhlenberg, play each other Saturday assuring only one of those teams has a chance at finishing ahead of Haverford who owns a victory in head-to-head match-ups with Gettysburg and the other 6-3 squad, Ursinus who closes out its regular season Friday at second-place and No. 13 Johns Hopkins.

The only certainty in the standings and playoff projections is that the Fords' fate will go down to the last game of the regular season.