Longtime Hill-Murray boys hockey coach Bill Lechner has a motto: “It’s always 70 and sunny.”

The Pioneers boys soccer team has adopted that as their mantra as well, even on nights like Tuesday when the weather is anything but.

A chilly late October downpour didn’t slow down senior midfielder Jacob Dinzeo and his teammates as No. 2 seed Hill-Murray scored five second-half goals en route to downing unseeded Mahtomedi 6-2 in a Class 2A state boys quarterfinal at White Bear Lake Area High School’s North Campus Stadium.

“I love it,” Dinzeo — who scored his team’s final two goals — said of the weather. “Everybody on this team loves it. These are our favorite nights. It doesn’t bother us at all.”

The Pioneers (15-3-2) advance to meet the winner of today’s quarterfinal between No. 3 seed Cloquet/Esko/Carlton (16-2) and unseeded St. Cloud Tech (8-7-3) in a semifinal matchup scheduled for 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 1 at U.S. Bank Stadium.

The Lumberjacks/Tigers matchup is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. today at White Bear Lake. Hill-Murray was the top seed in last season’s Class 2A tournament and advanced to the final before falling 3-2 to No. 2 seed DeLaSalle.

“We’re a pretty senior-heavy group,” Pioneers coach Jeff Zupfer said. “We have 19 seniors on the roster. So I think having that maturity, and having gotten a taste of playing at U.S. Bank last year, is big. We want to get back there and have that opportunity again. We feel like we have some unfinished business.

“But we know there are some great teams still alive, so we have our work cut out for us.”

A goal by senior forward Wilfredo Vargas put the Pioneers on top 1-0, then senior goalkeeper Tayler Pinx came up with a big stop on a Mahtomedi penalty kick late in the first half to keep his team on top by one at halftime.

“He’s unbelievable on penalty kicks,” Zupfer said of Pinx. “I think out of the around seven he has faced this season, he’s probably stopped five now. When he subbed off late, I told him that play changed the momentum of the entire game.”

That certainly seemed the case as Zupfer’s team wasted no time expanding on its margin to start the second half. Goals by senior forward Vinny Pearcy and junior midfielder Kevin Roman Puchaicela in the opening minutes built the lead to three.

“We went into halftime, and it was kind of an energy boost,” said Vargas, who assisted on Pearcy’s goal. “Just being around the boys and talking about what we could do better. We talked about playing the ball wide and taking guys on, and that’s exactly what we did.”

The Zephyrs (10-8-1) finally got on the board when junior forward Mason Kipp scored with 26:15 left to play. But senior forward Ronan O’Connor had a goal and Dinzeo added two more as Hill-Murray pulled away.

Mahtomedi senior defender Ben Carlson scored a goal with 10:20 to go to cut the gap to 6-2 — matching the score when the two teams met in the regular season on Sept. 14.

“Not getting the penalty kick to tie it up going into halftime really hurt us,” Zephyrs coach Dom Isaac said. “We knew in the second half, we’d probably have to attack a little bit more. Our strength is really defending in numbers, and when you have to push for a goal, you can give up some extra offense on their end.”

That extra offense lifted Hill-Murray back into the state semifinals.

“Our other motto is ‘stay in the present,’ ” Dinzeo said. “Next game. Next practice. So right now we’re focused on recovering and getting ready for (their semifinal matchup).

“But I’d be lying if I told you (a state title) wasn’t the mission. After what happened last year, everyone has wanted to get back (to state). Now we are and everyone on this team is locked in.”

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The Red Sox offered “the smartest man in baseball” the top job, and he accepted.

A source echoed Alex Speier’s and Michael Silverman’s report in the Boston Globe on Tuesday evening: the club offered Craig Breslow the job as head of baseball operations and he accepted.

Breslow had two stints with the Red Sox during his 11-year Major League career. He was instrumental to the 2013 championship, anchoring the bullpen with a career-best 1.18 ERA over 61 regular-season appearances. He made 10 relief appearances during that year’s postseason, including nine scoreless outings (eight consecutively).

In his post-playing career, the 43-year-old found a different way to impact a franchise’s pitching; as the Cubs’ assistant general manager and vice president of pitching, he’s transformed their farm system into a well-oiled arms development machine.

For the Red Sox, who seek new leadership but want much of their internal structure to stay the same, Breslow seems to make the most sense. He and Alex Cora were teammates in Boston in 2006-07, and many of the other executives have been with the organization since before he signed his minor-league contract with the team on February 1, 2006.

His New England roots run deep, too. A New Haven, Conn. native, Breslow was a star pitcher at Yale (and the Bulldogs’ team captain) before embarking upon his professional career. Though employed by the Chicago Cubs since 2019, he lives in Newton, Mass. and often works remotely.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s unceremonious ouster and the ensuing weeks of morass landed a one-two blow to California Republicans representing Biden-won House districts.

Not only did the half-dozen GOP members in swing seats lose their loyal patron, but each also voted to install, as McCarthy’s replacement, a hardliner in Ohio Republican Jim Jordan. He fell way short and gave up on the speakership, but not before California’s GOP delegation all put themselves on the record with a vote Democrats are salivating to use in next year’s elections.

“Regardless of who the speaker is, they’re going to try to weaponize that against me,” said Rep. Mike Garcia, one of six California Republicans facing tight races in Biden-won swing districts. Garcia contended his voters will separate him from Jordan when casting their ballots, but acknowledged it would create more fodder for his opponents.

Democrats have been quick to target battleground GOP members like Garcia over their support for Jordan, emphasizing his role in attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. More than a year before the November election, billboards are cropping up in Rep. Michelle Steel’s toss-up district picturing her next to former President Donald Trump and Jordan. Republicans’ utter lack of unity over a pick — after several others across the ideological spectrum faltered — is also being swept up in a broader critique by Democrats that, even amid two wars and a looming fiscal deadline in Washington, the GOP can’t lead itself let alone help govern the country.

California was already going to be a big uphill climb for Republicans to retain their advantage in the handful of competitive races given that 2024 will be a presidential election and the state keeps getting bluer. They’ll now have to do it without the beating heart of the state party — Kevin McCarthy — who for years has helped build their bench through energetic recruitment and showered the districts with money and attention even as the state Republican Party atrophied to the point of near non-existence.

So rudderless are they in Washington that one of their own, Rep. Tom McClintock, resorted to writing a sarcastic letter bemoaning the embarrassing situation. Chief among McClintock’s focuses was the loss of McCarthy.

David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst for The Cook Political Report, said the Bakersfield Republican still has a lot of money to push around, though less than he did as speaker, and that he will likely take care of his California colleagues first. Indeed, McCarthy has assured the conference that he plans to keep helping. Yet it’s not even clear how long he’ll stick around in the job, which has forced members to plan for life after McCarthy.

Rep. David Valadao squeezed by pro-Trump primary challenger Chris Mathys by a razor-thin margin last year and went on to beat former Democratic Assemblymember Rudy Salas by just 3 percentage points in the general election. But the congressman who in 2021 voted to impeach Trump has continued to veer right. He cast three votes for Jordan, which he’ll have to justify to blue-leaning voters and moderates in a district heavily populated by immigrants and farmworkers.

His Central Valley colleague Rep. John Duarte also had a narrow triumph last year, defeating former Democratic Assemblymember Adam Gray by a mere 564 votes. In other districts — such as Garcia’s and Steel’s — Democrats hold a significant registration advantage. In his newly redrawn district that encompasses Palm Springs, Rep. Ken Calvert won by less than five percent. Rep. Young Kim, though beating her opponent by a larger margin, also represents a Biden-won district.

Democrats are seizing the opportunity to broaden the narrative beyond Jordan by linking the six vulnerable Republicans to MAGA extremism.

“Vulnerable Republicans like Calvert, Duarte, Garcia, Steel, and Valadao have spent the past week showing Californians exactly who they are — enablers of their party’s worst impulses and far-right extremists who want to ban abortion and overturn election results,” said DCCC spokesperson Dan Gottlieb. “These GOP shills can speak about moderation until they’re blue in the face, but they cave to their MAGA extremist friends almost every time.”

Mired in a speaker race with no end in sight, Garcia looked for a win after casting his politically sticky vote for Jordan. He jumped into negotiations with Jordan over a proposal to raise a Trump-era cap on tax deductions — though the prospect of striking a deal popular in his high-tax state was short-lived after Jordan dropped out of the running.

Jordan’s demise is not the end of the line for conservative hardliners seeking to lead the fractured Republican conference. Of the nine candidates who threw their hat in the ring after the Ohio Republican dropped out, seven voted to overturn the 2020 election results.

Tom Emmer, House Majority Whip, was one of two speaker candidates who voted against the measure not to certify the 2020 election results and received the conference nomination. As a relative moderate, Emmer was the politically safest candidate for the swing-district Republicans to back. But with Emmer now out of the running, they will likely be forced to take tough votes on hardline candidates while pushing for McCarthy’s return.

Republicans by and large reject the idea that the speaker race will remain top-of-mind for California voters next fall, like other economic and public safety related issues. But they’ve become increasingly aware they’ll have to fight it out without a safety net in McCarthy.

“Nothing’s better than having Kevin McCarthy from the Central Valley as the Republican speaker of the House,” Duarte said in an interview. “And I’m a Central Valley Republican running in a tough district.”